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Our Daily Thread 4-4-14

Good Morning!

It’s Friday!

On this day in 1818 the U.S. flag was declared to have 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars and that a new star would be added for the each new state. 

In 1850 the city of Los Angeles was incorporated. 

In 1862 the Battle of Yorktown began as Union General George B. McClellan closed in on Richmond, VA.

And in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

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Quote of the Day

“Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.”

Henry Van Dyke

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Today is Steve Gatlin’s birthday? From GaitherVEVO

And it’s Elmer Bernstein’s as well. Too many to choose from with him, so greatest hits it is. From benydebney

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Anyone have a QoD?

72 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 4-4-14”

  3. I hardly slept last night–but, feel fine this morning. Only eight weeks of school left!!! And, then I will officially have a high schooler! We will definitely be homeschooling Becca again next year. She’s made a lot of progress, but is still behind in math. I plan to continue working with her on math over the summer. It’s been such a blessing to have her home–she is so much happier and well-adjusted than when she was in public school. The changes are nothing less than miraculous. Thanks to all who pray for us!

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  5. I agree, today’s header is great, but did not appreciate the rhino or tigers, sorry Aj.
    Good job on the homeschooling, but we have more than 8 weeks left!

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  6. true confession: I was trying to figure out what was wrong with my little study lamp that I use. It did not seem to be working and I thought it must be broken. But what is there to break on a small lamp? finally, tonight, I tried a new light bulb, duh…. It works. It has been so long since a light bulb burned out that I had forgotten to check

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  7. Good morning everyone!
    It’s Friday. You know what that means?
    I don’t either. We Lions are going to load wheelbarrows with food and push them down the street to the Storehouse. A publicity stunt. I’ll be glad when it’s over.

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  9. Good morning everyone. Hope you all have a great day! It will be busy here in my little corner of the world.

    ANNMS, has anyone mentioned Saxon Math to you? When I taught math in a college prep school it was the program we used. It builds on itself and when you get to the last chapter you may still have a problem from the first few chapters. I loved it as a teacher.

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  10. What a delight I just had looking out the window. I saw a Blue Jay in the bare limbs of the young beech tree. It moved over to the other side of the tree. I was thinking how long it had been since I had seen one. Then another bird landed on the other side of the tree. It was a Cardinal. It was a moment of wishing for Cheryl’s new camera and a window without a screen! God is good!

    Bosley was not in her bed this morning and all was quiet so I knew she was asleep somewhere. I guessed it! She had moved on to a bigger bed. She was on my son’s bed since the door was open. Who wants a cat bed when they can have a people bed?

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  11. Annms, we did math every summer and it worked well to keep the brain going in that mode so as to not lose ground. I also went to a local learning center store and bought math games to make it more fun. And ss Kim said, we loved Saxon msth. No bells and whistles, but it works. Also, Singapore math is suppose to be excellent as an alternative.

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  12. Saxon is good for early math, but we’d warn against it for upper division. My oldest son’s high school used it and he transferred in as a junior into Calculus. Got a 5 on the AP Calculus exam, but when he went to college as a Physics major, nearly flunked his math classes.

    Saxon relied on rote–which is fine– but not for higher math that requires understanding the why, particularly if you’re applying it in the sciences.

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  13. Math and reading over the summer, for sure. I have several that will be doing work over the summer and several that will be able to take a break but will not want to as they see the end looming for them. Just a little bit more and they can get done and move on with life. Some have college aspirations, some don’t, it is all good.

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  14. My son did not use Saxon for the higher level math. He took a class with other homeschoolers for Pre-Calculus and Calculus.

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  16. I have enjoyed all of the pics, including the tigers and rhino. Except they may have been indoors. Like in a zoo. Or do they run wild there, the real?

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  18. The tigers and rhino were unexpected, but good photos. I guess because I can see them at the Atlanta Zoo I prefer to see photos of things I don’t have the ability to see in my hometown.

    Even though I can see birds here, I appreciate the up close photos because I don’t get to see them like that here.

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  19. No tigers here Mumsee. But I do have a little wild cat. 🙂

    I have no idea what kind of bird it is. I thought it was some type of woodpecker. It was really hard to get because it was far away and kept moving. But I got a few of them. I was hoping Cheryl would know what it was. 🙂

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  24. Chas, on several woodpeckers only the females have red on the back of the head, and this one does. I don’t quite think it’s a downy, though. That was my first hunch, and it might be, but it doesn’t quite look right for that. Possibly a hairy (they have longer beaks and the yellow patches beside the beak aren’t as pronounced), but that isn’t a very good look at the tail but it doesn’t look right either. The problem with downies, though, is that from every angle they look a little different.

    OK, I compared it to my own photos of downy and hairy woodpeckers. It isn’t a downy, and it doesn’t have the right face for a hairy either (both of those species have a black mask over the eyes, with a white stripe above and below), unless juveniles look like that. AJ, what state are you in, again? If it is a woodpecker, we can see what woodpeckers are in your state, and narrow it down.

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  25. Woodpecker. I also liked the rhino & tigers. A day at the zoo. 🙂

    Our new mayor is trying to keep the film industry “home.” We’ve lost a lot of it in recent years, our own fault, really, with all the growing regulations and taxes here (coupled with other states offering attractive incentives to lure film companies their way).

    Stop stealing our business. 😉

    I’m glad it’s Friday. It’s been a stressful week on a lot of levels for me.

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  29. Georgia gave the film industry a lot of incentives to do business here.

    Sorry, Donna. Maybe you need to move here. At least around the city you can probably find many with a CA mindset. 🙂 😦 😦

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  32. Mumsee, what I noticed on the “front” is the white patch on the front of the wing, which doesn’t seem to be a hairy or downy trait that I can see.

    But I don’t see it among Pennsylvania woodpeckers. It looks like they pretty much have the same woodpeckers we do: the hairy, the downy, the flicker, the red-headed, a sapsucker, the pileated, and the red-bellied. The sapsucker is the only one of those birds I don’t know very well. The others, except for the pileated and the red-headed, we get on the tree right behind our kitchen window, and it clearly isn’t a pileated or a red-headed. So, I don’t know.

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  35. We get a lot of woodpeckers here, including the pileated. That one is magnificent, although I always think of “Woody” when I see it. Somehow that keeps it more down to earth. 😉

    We also have the sapsuckers. They destroy the trees and will move on to other structures sometimes. We also get flickers, but we usually see them on the ground. They like to eat ants, I guess. I am not sure what this one happens to be, though.

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  36. Kathaleena, yes, flickers usually feed on the ground, and do like ants. We get them in the trees sometimes, though, and they come to our suet feeder occasionally in winter (usu. only in really bad weather). Pileated I’ve only seen a few times, rarely up close, and I have yet to get a good photo of one (one thing I hope to change with the new camera). I’ve also only gotten distant shots of the red-headed, though my husband and I now know where to find them dependably, and with the new camera I should be able to get a better shot of them. Sapsuckers I haven’t seen in many years, though my husband saw a glimpse of one last summer in the same area where we go to see the other woodpeckers (one time we saw all our woodpecker species within half an hour there!), and I hope to see them someday too.

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  37. I did get a couple of pictures of the pileated, but only through a window and not a close-up. My folks get them regularly and those are close to the house. However, I am usually not there with a camera.

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  38. I’m pretty sure the header picture is a downy, although I don’t know why it has that long white patch on the wing. It’s definitely some sort of woodpecker, and to me looks most like a downy or hairy, but the reason I believe it’s the former rather than the latter is because of the length of the bill. In the field guides I own, I see the downy woodpecker’s bill is about half the length of the distance from the bird’s back of the head to the front (not including the bill), whereas the hairy woodpecker’s bill length is well more than half the length from the back to the front of its own head. On my computer screen, AJ’s picture of the bird shows about a 3/4-inch bill and an approximately 1 and 1/2 inch head measurement. That’s mainly what I’m going by to identify it as a downy over a hairy, as the one measurement is about half that of the other measurement, consistent with a downy. It also has the black and white spotted pattern on its tail feathers, not the pure white characteristic of a hairy woodpecker’s tail feathers

    Cheryl, I think the bird is a juvenile, which could explain some of its atypical markings. The red feathers on the top of its head probably indicates a young male where the red patch hasn’t “migrated” yet, if you will, to its familiar place at the back of its head, which we see with the smaller adult male woodpeckers. See this video of an adult downy feeding a juvenile male at the bottom right of this page: http://www.pugetsoundbackyardbirds.com/downywoodpeckershow.html In the video, the juvenile’s red patch is at the top of its head.

    Also, Cheryl, I noted with interest that the bird pictured above (which AJ photographed) doesn’t seem to have that distinctive black mask over the eyes with the white stripe above and below, as you pointed out at 11:36. There is a small bit of black, though, in that sea of white feathers on the side of its head that is visible to us, and the black seems to go across its eye and is barely visible, in a shadow-like way, on the upper right side of its eye. So I think in time, as the bird becomes an adult, the black area will become larger and more pronounced, appearing more familiar than it does now.

    Those are my random speculations. 😉

    AJ, I’m curious, what time of the year did you photograph that bird? Do you remember seeing any similar-looking birds in the area that may have been feeding it?

    I’m also curious whether you heard any particular sound the bird may have been making. We’ve had a lot of downy woodpeckers in our area, and not as many hairy woodpeckers, but the first time I ever noticed a hairy, it was because of its very distinctive sound. It sounded like a loud squeak toy, and was very noticeable, even with all the other bird song going on in our wooded area at the same time, including that of downies, which have a fairly similar sound, but not nearly as loud.

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  39. Kathaleena, my only photo of one is really bad. My husband and I were hiking at Turkey Run State Park, and we could see a pileated some distance away, too far for photos. I stuck around, hoping he’d come closer. Then I saw some movement on the ground and the color red, so I snapped a photo, but I couldn’t see what I was shooting. When I pulled it up onto his laptop that evening, I had a pileated . . . but it had shrubs and leaves between me and him, so basically all I had was “proof” that the pileated had been feeding on the ground, and not a good photo of him. But if I hadn’t already seen him in the trees, it would at least have confirmed that there was a pileated in the woods that day, since it was clear enough for identification. But my husband has fallen in love with the species, and I’d love to be able to get a great photo or two of them.

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  41. Kathaleena, it’s also possible for any bird to deviate a little from the norm for its species in terms of coloration. A few days ago I snapped some photos of a grackle in my backyard that had a distinctively white tail. With the naked eye its tail looked all white (rather than black) and through the lens it became obvious that the feathers on top were white but it also had black tail feathers. Either way, someone who asked about the identity of a bird the size and shape of a blackbird, with a white-and-black tail, would have gotten a puzzled reaction, because it’s atypical coloring. When I was a child, I knew a lot of the starlings that came to our yard by sight, because they had one white feather somewhere, and the placement of the feather varied by the bird.

    The bird is closer to a downy or a hairy than to any other woodpecker I’m familiar with, but it has enough differences to be hard to say. But then, I’m making a book of bird photos, and I am including a spread of photos of downies, in which the purpose of the pages is to show how different that species looks from different angles. From some angles it looks soft and cuddly, from others fierce and menacing, and I even have one photo in which it could be some weird insect.

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  42. I wonder if there was some cross-breeding there. I don’t know if woodpeckers do, but I’ve heard of it happening before (I don’t think it’s very common) with, I think it may have been, purple finches and house finches, or something like that.

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  43. Kim, I remember “peckerwood” too, In SC it meant, not a bad, but sort of a nuisance guy.

    Otherwise, I believe everything you guys said about woodpeckers.

    The trip to the Sotrehouse turned out well. We gave over 550 # of food.

    The bad weather that some of you got broke up just before it got here. We had cloudy buy otherwise nice weather for the outing.

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  44. Female yellow-bellied sapsucker (male has red throat too) – the white wing stripe is distinctive. Good catch, the Real – they are very shy birds.

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  45. Not long now to second sibling’s wedding and its busy around here. Besides providing the music for the ceremony, I am also helping to sew the wedding dress. We should have it done on time… Second sibling and fiancé still haven’t found a place to stay.

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  46. Before I saw your post, Roscuro, I was going to ask if anyone else noticed the yellow on the throat that I see a glimpse of.

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  47. Okay, upon closer examination of one of my field guides, I see Roscuro is right. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild.

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  48. When our son was little, his favorite book was his book of birds….his favorite bird….yellow belly sapsucker…every bird to him was a yellow belly sapsucker…it was so fun to ask him to name the bird…any bird…we spotted…”yella belly saaaapsucker”…I miss those days!
    I have a love hate relationship with woodpeckers…they are fun to watch..they are good at eating up all the pesky bugs…but they can be a pain…pecking on the house/roof/stucco….they just need to stay off of my house and keep to the trees!

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  49. Good ID, Phos. From the photos I saw of birds in his state, I was leaning toward sapsuckers, but I’ve only ever seen one or two in the wild, many years ago, and just don’t know them. This one doesn’t have the tail of a downy, but I don’t know juvenile downies and couldn’t rule it out. (I know that many birds don’t get their full tails right away.)

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  53. I took that pic at the park near our house yesterday. I was in the play area and it was about 200ft. away up the hill near the old railroad bed. It circled the tree from top to bottom and then moved on to the next. Didn’t hear any pecking. It was there the whole time we were, but it kept going out of sight up the hill. Then it would come back to the tree you see it on every few minutes.

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  54. Well, I was a bit of a bird expert in my time 😉 I was going through my memory box the other day, and one of the things I still have is my very first science project, all about common birds, written in very awkward letters and accompanied by my own imitations of Audubon. I remember being complemented very highly on my skill in rendering the birds. At the time, I thought that meant I was a talented artist, now I realize they were impressed by my skill for my age level. Like many child prodigies, my early promise became average in adulthood. 😀

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  58. Mumsee, that is called plagiarism!

    I did look the bird up in the Audubon Society Guide before I made my pronouncement (though I have really seen sapsuckers), but I followed my mother’s instruction for those long ago years, and put it in my own words 😆

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  60. I like that you can hover the cursor over the smilies and see what the commenter typed. Then we know who does : ) and who does : – ) to make 🙂

    😉

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  67. I’ve mentioned here before that I listen to Minnesota Public Radio while I’m online. Interesting that just now I heard an “ad” (okay, it’s not really an ad, they say — I forget what they do call it) for a display, at the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum of Natural History, called “Audubon and the Art of Birds.” Looks interesting for any bird aficionado who might be able to get to the Minneapolis area during the time of the exhibit (through June 8 this year).

    http://www.bellmuseum.umn.edu/ForAdults/Exhibits/AudubonandtheArtofBirds/index.htm

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  72. I go away and then come back and Aj has changed the header right in the middle of my day, will wonders never cease??
    Mumsee, you do keep us on our toes!

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