I couldn’t attend the Audubon bird walk at the lagoon this past weekend, but I’ve been using my beaut new binos here at home every day. I’ll be hanging with the birders again in January. Maybe I need to get myself one of those harness straps like the serious birders wear.
Helena Fitzgerald calls the week between Christmas and New Year Dead Week. For me, it’s always the opposite — it’s the time of year when I go into a flurry of gift making. Given that most of my loved ones live on the other side of the planet, gifting requires advance planning. I love to start the New Year with a bit of hoard of future presents and cards, ready to pop in the mail at the appropriate time.
For a few years there, USPS wasn’t shipping parcels to Australia, which really put the kibosh on my handmade gift-giving. Even a card was taking up to three months to arrive. Ordering something from Book Depository to be shipped direct to the recipient just didn’t give me the same joy. So I’m thrilled that the mail service seems to be back to its pre-pandemic level of operation (still slow and expensive, but the goods get there within a month.)
All that to say … this isn’t Dead Week. For me, it’s Maker Week. 😊
Another birthday card. Quote is from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. I have an old paperback that fell apart, so I harvest it for found poetry.
My eldest daughter shares her name with a gorgeous New Zealand bird, so I sent her this painting as a Christmas gift.
The tūī is a boisterous, medium-sized honeyeater, with blue, green, and bronze colouration and a distinctive white throat tuft. Tūī are known for their noisy, unusual, sometimes soulful calls, different for each individual, that combine bellbird-like notes with clicks, cackles, timber-like creaks and groans, and wheezing sounds. They can imitate human speech, along with sounds like glass shattering, car alarms, classical music and advertising jingles.
Merry Christmas, Tui!
Photo reference by Sid Modsell, used under Creative Commons 2.0
I’ve been working on cards for the January birthdays. Having fun.
I was not one of those kids who could draw horses. Ilona Pochwyt in Grade 2, on the other hand, drew them obsessively. It was while watching her effortlessly sketch a ‘colt’ (I had never even heard the word before, they were all horsies to me) that I decided that drawing was a talent, and I definitely didn’t have it. I wonder if my life’s trajectory would have been different if, instead of shutting down the artist within at age 7, I’d asked Ilona to teach me how to draw a horse.
Fast forward several decades and I finally understood that drawing is a skill, not a talent. But I still, until today, had never drawn a horse. My thanks go to John Muir Laws for the equine anatomy lesson, and to Danny Gregory for the prompt. A hurdle has been leapt, a monster vanquished. I see many more sketched horses in my future.
Eating from the garden is such a pleasure.
The tarantula hawk is one of the largest parasitoid wasps, using its sting to paralyze its tarantula prey before dragging it to a brood nest as living food. A single egg is laid on the spider, hatching to a larva which eats the still-living host. They are found on all continents except Antarctica.
Tarantula hawk wasps are relatively docile and rarely sting humans without provocation. However, the sting is among the most painful of all insects’, though the intense pain only lasts about five minutes. In terms of scale, the wasp’s sting is rated near the top of the Schmidt sting pain index, second only to that of the bullet ant, and is described by Schmidt as “blinding, fierce, and shockingly electric”.
The plants in front of the kitchen window have effectively stopped the bird strikes, and are providing a source of enjoyment for both humans and avians. It was fun to watch this California towhee hop on to the fuchsia frame to eat the ripe berries.
Dudleya is a relatively obscure genus of succulents. Species come in multiple divergent sizes and forms, though most readily hybridise. Ten species are on the California state list of threatened or endangered plants.
Poached plants are often shipped to East Asia, especially South Korea. In Sept 2021, California state law AB 223 was signed, making it illegal to harvest any Dudleya species in CA without a permit or landowner permission, and establishing penalties for individuals convicted of doing so. This was the first CA law specifically drafted to protect plants from poaching.
hashiworks 