Minnesota Spring
A bunch of photos, unrelated to disability except in the "stay in your house!" sense:
The first four were taken at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum the first week in June. The last photo was taken yesterday in my front yard.
Image description: My favorite easy-access spot at the arboretum is on this wooden bridge over a gurgling brook. Sit facing south and looking over the right side and the water trails away amidst big boulders while the crabapple blooms overhead. Lush, green, shady.
Image description: Look down the other side of the walkway over the stream and the water runs a bit slower, pooling around smaller rocks that have bright green moss growing on them.
Image description: Evergreen branches heavy with lush fresh growth -- thick soft pine needles in bright green -- hang all around the stream's shaded walkway.
Image description: My twin and I (bet you still can't tell us apart) and, I think, St. Francis of Assisi amidst the blooming lilacs. We stand on a groomed lawn next to a bronze statue of a robed figure with a bird resting on an outstretched arm. Behind us is a low retaining wall, and just behind that a profusion of blooming lilac bushes in your basic shade of lilac. The parenthetical joke just above is that my twin weighs about 100 pounds more than I and walks and breathes without assistive equipment. Otherwise, we're identical -- not.
For Sara.
Image description: A tiny nest filled to capacity with baby birds. The nest is maybe three inches in diameter and lies just inside the top of an evergreen bush. Four open mouths wait for a responsible adult to bring eats. One bird, much bigger than the other three, did not come from a finch egg. He's an infant interloper. Everybody's very fragile and helpless and ugly.
Update: The baby birds didn't fare well. Two days after the photo was taken there were just three birds in the nest. Two days after that, just the one bigger baby, who seemed dead. I think the interloper crowded the others out and the parents then abandoned the nest. There's a bluejay nest in the oak tree out back that I'm also keeping an eye on. I can see it from my window as I type. All seems happier there.
9 comments:
Yay! Spring DID come to Minnesota, and you are out in it! Excellent!
Thank you for the birds. :) Yes, at this point, they are all mouths. I met my friend Kathy when the kid next door found a baby bird out of its nest in our shared yard and neither of us had any clue what to do for it. Under Kathy's instructions, to keep it alive 'til I could bring it to her, I had to feed the little bugger every 20 minutes until sunset and then again starting at 5:00 a.m. And this is what the parent birds do, too. This is why bird feeders are so helpful. The seed provides carbs to the parents so they can run around all day -- literally ALL day -- finding things to drop into those open pink targets. And each mating pair of wild songbirds does this at least three times every summer. Can you imagine?
They sure are cute, even the "interloper." Amazing.
Amazing pictures. I want to just sit in those lilac bushes and breathe deeply.
NEST PARASITISM! The biologist in me is surprised the other three are still alive. Keep me updated?
personally I'm a sucker for the Japanese garden and ponds around it. But the waterfalls, brook and walkway are a close second.
If you live near a aborterum...go, visit,enjoy...maybe even volenteer.
Great pics, thanks
Great photos! Did you take them? If so, what camera did you use (if you don't mind my asking)?
Sorry to hear those babies didn't make it...
(insert hope for the blue jays here)
Sara: I hadn't thought before of the birdfeeder as playing such a crucial role in bird parenting, but that makes good sense. The bluejays are still doing well. Just yesterday, though, there was a standoff between a robin and one of the adult bluejays. The robin wanted to take a dip in the nearby birdbath and the bluejay thought the robin was too close to the nest. The robin sat there stubbornly waiting for the jay to stop staring and the jay wouldn't go away. Birds are surprisingly humorous.
Connie: It is my camera but my sister and nurse happened to take those pics at the arboretum. I have no entirely mastered driving my scooter and getting the pics I want so I often share the camera around. I sit too low to take the pic of the bird nest and my Mom snapped that one. The pic was how I could see what's there without being too intrusive.
I am very happy with the quality of the photos from the camera. It's a little Canon Powershot SD630 -- a few years old now. My only complaint is that it has not yet made the switch to my Mac with me. It wants something more complicated than a new driver to sync and I upload these on a PC laptop to my Flickr account to get them online for the blog.
Great photos! I especially love the water scenes...any body of water--lake, ocean, river, pond--causes me to pause and "reflect". (Pun intended)
Looks like it was a beautiful day for you. Baby birds? Nature sometimes seems so cruel, but I'm not always privy to the "larger plan"... :-)
Linda D/Braincheese in Seattle
Oh Minnesota! These photos make me miss it even more. I'm glad you got to be out in the gardens!
One of my friends recently pointed out to me that Coney Island is the only accessible beach in the whole of NYC, and I guess that makes sense given its history. But I was still shocked to think of that.
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