Happy Birthday, Samantha

When I think of reading to you when you were young I think of poetry. First I read Mother Goose rhymes to you. Then I found an old poetry book I had read to your mom when she was young. Its cover was taped on with masking tape so when I came across a newer edition, I bought it.
 

By the time you were in kindergarten, you wanted something different so I found a poetry book whose title, Sing a Song of Popcorn, I remembered from a Children's Literature class.

Remember the Jumblies? The refrain was...

     Far and few, far and few,
        Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
     Their heads are green and their hands are blue,
        And they went to sea in a sieve.

The poet is Edward Lear.
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Click on the picture to get a better look at the Jumblies.

Birding at Lake Erie, March 28,29,30, 2012

The weather this year was similar to last year at the same time, raw, cold, and windy. On Wednesday afternoon and on Friday morning we did all of our birding from the van. For those of you who are interested in numbers...we saw fifty-one species, including two American bald eagles sitting on mounds in the marsh at Ottawa.  It was a closer longer view than we usually get of these birds. We enjoyed watching them with naked eyes and with binoculars. They were still sitting on the mounds when we drove on.

On Thursday, we braved the weather and spent over two hours on the boardwalk at Magee Marsh. The first warblers have arrived. We saw a few male yellow-rumped warblers. Tom spotted a ruby-crowned kinglet. Quite a few fox sparrows were flitting in the trees. We saw a few winter wrens scurrying among the tree roots. They will be leaving for the north soon. None of the small birds sat long enough for Tom to snap their pictures. But we saw a lot of bigger birds that Tom was able to photograph. We saw rafts of American coots everywhere, at Metzger, Magee and Ottawa.

Here is a closer look at a coot.

The most exciting sighting was twenty-one trumpeter swans at the first big pond at Ottawa. Here is one grouping. Their necks are dirty pink because they feed by dipping their long necks into the marsh.

I was hoping to see shorebirds. Last year, when the only camera we had with us was my little one, we saw a flock of snipe at the first marshy area after coming into Ottawa. Click on the photo to see the snipes a bit better.

This year the water was deeper in the marshy area and we saw two great egrets.

This is the time of year when there are a lot of shovelers. Their name comes from their shovel-like bill that they use to scoop up food.

This shoveler is using his shovel.

The tree swallows have paired up.

And everywhere the male red-winged blackbirds were singing, hoping to entice the females to join them.
 

Cutleaf Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata)

           Photo by Tom Persing

To me, "cutleaf" is descriptive of its leaves. "Wort" is an Old English word meaning "plant" so that part of the name is also obvious. "Tooth" is not so obvious. I have never dug up a toothwort but all the sources I have looked at assure me that there is a toothlike appearance to its segmented rhizome. My two oldest wildflower fieldguides identify it as "Dentaria laciniata". This is its former scientific name. The old Genus, "Dentaria" refers to those toothlike segments on the rhizome.

Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and alchemist who lived from 1491 to 1541, developed a philosophy called "The Doctrine of Signatures". Its premise was that plant shapes and colors were signs that these plants would cure diseases and problems suggested by the appearance of the plants. Thus, because the rhizome of the toothwort resembles teeth, it is useful for curing problems of the teeth. Jakob Bohme, a German mystic who lived from 1575 to 1624, suggested that God marked objects such as plants with a "signature" to suggest their purposes for man. The Doctrine of Signatures continued to be a popular belief for centuries, especially among herbalista.

There is no scientific evidence that the uses of plants are determined by their appearances.

I Meant to Do My Work Today

The first line of this poem by Richard Le Gallienne has been running around in my mind ever since this beautiful early spring arrived. Click on the picture to enlarge it and read the poem more easily.

I have been painting although I have no painting ready to discuss on this blog. On Thursday, I painted "en plein air" for the first time this spring. A friend and I met at Hobart Urban Nature Reserve. The day was HOT (81 degrees Farenheit)and the sun was bright. On Saturday, two friends and I painted at Andy's Garden, a large plant nursery in Troy. We sat around a display of Bleeding hearts, painted and talked.   Again, I don't have the painting to the point where I want to share it.

When I haven't been painting with friends, I have been walking with Tom at Garbry Big Woods Sanctuary and Charleston Falls. Yesterday, Tom and I spent about an hour on Redbud Trail watching the downy white Great Horned Owlet in the hole in a tree growing in the ravine below the trail. The best Tom was able to get with his Canon EOS was the owlet peeking at him with one eye. The day was cold and windy but sunny.

And here is the owl a bit closer.

For some reason, blogger kept turning the digital photo in the computer sideways even after I had turned it so I resorted to printing a photo, scanning it in and showing it to you via this method. That probably accounts for the poor quality.

March 19, 2012...a walk at Garbry Big Woods Sanctuary

Tom and I decided it was long past time to make our first visit of the year to Garbry Big Woods Sanctuary. We wondered if we would find any Harbinger-of-Spring since the Purple Cress was already blooming at Charleston Falls. We were in luck. We found a few Harbinger-of-Spring (Erigenia bulbosa) although we had missed the height of its season. This is a photo from last year.

One of the special plants growing at Garbry Big Woods Sanctuary is Spicebush (Lindera benzoin). If a twig is scratched, it releases a lovely spicy fragrance. The flowers which have no petals are tiny, hard for me to photograph with my little camera so I was pleased Tom was with me to take this photo of the tiny blossoms with his Canon. The bushes were in full bloom so there was a yellow haze about eye level throughout the woods.

And here are more plants that we found. We found both waterleafs...Virginia (Hydrophyllum virginanum)

And...Appendaged (Hydrophyllum appendiculatum)

We found lots of Purple Cress (Cardamine douglassii). This must be the perfect year for that plant.

We found the first Hepatica that we have seen. Most of the Hepatica that I see in this area is round-lobed Hepatica (Hepatica americana). We have had reports that it has been blooming at Brukner Nature Center for over a week.

This is one of my favorite photos that Tom took. It is even possible to see the veins in the white petals of this Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis).

And we found three surprises. All are in the photo below that I took.

The Dutchmen's Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) was a surprise because it wasn't blooming and it is blooming at Charleston Falls. That could be partly because the Charleston Falls patch is in a sunnier location.

The ragged "umbrella" leaf is Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum). I think of it as one of the later spring flowers. On Nature Awareness hikes I always tell the children it is called Mayapple because it blooms in early May and has little green "apples" on it before May is over. There were lots of Mayapples with their leaves unfurled, not just this one. And below the Mayapple  is a Wild Blue Phlox (Phlox divaricata). It usually blooms when the Large-flowered Trillium blooms. Here is a close look at a Wild Blue Phlox plant.

I am fascinated by wildflowers for multiple reasons. Many of them have unique life cycles and interesting adaptations. In addition, they often have legends associated with them.

Spring...What a Difference a Day Makes

Saturday morning was foggy and a little overcast when Jeanne and I started off down the trail at Charleston Falls. The bush honeysuckle leaves were popping out. This is not a happy thing. Bush honeysuckle is an alien species which crowds out the native plants. The park staff is constantly eradicating it by a variety of methods. In our part of Ohio, keeping the honeysuckle in check seems to be the best we can do. But as we approached the falls, we saw other leaves.

The Ohio Buckeye (Aesculus glabra) is the earliest native tree to open its leaves in the Miami Valley woods. Lots of the buds were not yet open. if you enlarge the photo below you can see the large whitish leaf scars that last year' leaves left when they fell.

Just beyond the falls and beyond the creek which feeds it, I was amazed by this sight. Usually, I see other wildflowers before I see Purple Cress (Cardamine douglassii).

As we walked on Redbud Valley Trail above the falls, we found leaves of Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) and also Bloodroot buds(Sanguinaria canadensis).

At the bottom of the trail we found a few leaves of Dutchmen's Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria). By the time we had climbed up out of the ravine, the sun was out and the fog had condensed on the spiders' webs.

The walk was a lovely one, even though we saw only a few flowers. We knew spring was on its way.

The next morning, Stephen and I discovered that spring had truly sprung. Stephen spotted the first sign.

Spring Beauties (Claytonia virginica). Once Stephen found the first couple, we found them everywhere we looked. But the next flower we found was more amazing. Jeanne and I looked for Dutchmen's Breeches but all we found were a few leaves. This is what Stephen and I found.

Portrait and Figure Studio, March 15, 2012

Here is the model for the session at Troy-Hayner Cultural Center. And below is my interpretation...

The striped object on her lap is a purse. I worked two half hour sessions on this and decided to stop because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do next. During the second half hour, I had begun working on getting more definition but I know I want to do even more definition.

Since I haven't come to the studio session for some time, I painted on Fredrix Watercolor Canvas which makes adjustments very easy. The strokes I wasn't happy with I could wipe out with water. However, when I go back and repaint, the underlying layer lifts if there is too much water on my brush. Adjustments become an issue of "erasing" and then repainting.

Back home, I checked proportions. The legs from knee to ankle are a bit too short. The hand compared to the size of the face was close to "right". The foot could have been a bit larger. I wasn't particularly pleased with the face. The proportions aren't too bad but the expression isn't close enough to that of the model.

People come in all sizes and shapes as you know. The rule of thumb is that people are 7 1/2 heads high (or sometimes 8 heads high for adult males).   Common errors in drawing people are drawing the head too large and drawing the hands and feet too small.  People vary a lot in actual proportions so the 7 1/2 heads or 8 heads is only an approximation, a starting point.  Also, proportions from birth to adulthood vary with age as well as with the individual.  Every person  is unique.

A good book for learning proportions is Drawing the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm. Even though the original copyright date is 1963, it is still available from Amazon.com. And, it is inexpensive.