Watching the Eagles' Nest Cam

It feels like it's been such a long winter, but it's finally getting to be Spring again; hurray!! One of the early signs of Spring is that the nest cams start to be available, and we are big fans, particularly since getting outside has been happening... but not not consistently yet. Winter can be done any time.

This Week: Miss Kitty Turns Five

All year, we've been telling Miss Kitty how long it is to her birthday. She asks frequently:

"How long till my birthday?"
"It's a long time; about 9 months. Which means that it's about 36 Sundays."

I don't think she counts to 36 yet, but that seems more meaningful to her than the number of months.

"Is my birthday almost here?"
"No, it's still a long time. It's summer, and then fall will come, and we'll have Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and the New Year will come, and THEN it will be your birthday. It's around 24 Sundays."

"My birthday is far away, isn't it? How many Sundays to my birthday?"
"Still a whole bunch. First Daddy has his birthday, then Hero, then Jesus, then you. That's about 20 Sundays."

Sometime after Halloween, the number of Sundays got low enough that it started to be close enough to be numbers that are meaningful to her. This was pretty exciting. And then something even more exciting happened just this last Sunday night at bedtime:

"I only have ONE SUNDAY LEFT until my birthday comes!"
"Well.... actually, today was that last Sunday. There are no more Sundays before your birthday: your birthday is on Friday. That's only five Sleeps away!"
"No more Sundays? Only five Sleeps??"

Oh yes, this was an excited girl. And that's the biggest news of the week: Miss Kitty is turning five at the end of the week. And she's making Big Plans: she's having friends over to make crowns (made out of paper, with stickers) and play in a fort (a really big fort), and eat a cake (because we usually eat cake on birthdays) with ice cream.

A Wasp that Does Not Sting

Found the coolest bug the other day; it freaked me out. I mean, check out that "stinger" -- the thing looks like a scorpion, for crying out loud! I almost didn't take the picture, but it was just sitting there, and had been sitting there, and I was feeling a bit brave. So I risked getting close to that thing to get the picture. And it didn't even wiggle when I put my phone up (kind of) close. Turns out, I didn't need to worry: they don't sting, crazy hind end notwithstanding.

Then I didn't think too much more about it for the moment, because I was watching kids. And the kids were watching the animals in the little farm thing in the park. And it was good. We pondered llama fur and frolicking piggies. Discussed why we shouldn't try to feed them. The llamas are new to the little zoo thingy, and we happened to stop by a while back when they were brand new, and you could see how uncomfortable they were, last time we visited. This time, they were chill. One of them was sitting down. The other was snacking. Neither one gave us a second glance. It was cool to see how nicely they'd adjusted to having kids come and ooh and aaaah over them. Mine sure did!

Later, we saw this cool caterpillar. He could really move! I forgot to ask Facebook what kind he is, but I think he's cool, even not knowing what he'll grow up into.

 I did go find out about the big black scorpion-looking wasp thing. The nice folks on the Facebook bug group told me it's an American Pelecinid Wasp. And it does not sting. Which blew my mind, what with a huge singer-looking thinger there at the back. The one I saw is a female, and that huge abdomen is for probing the ground-- she's looking for grubs, and if she finds one, she nails it with an egg. I don't feel sorry for the grubs. Eww.

Turns out, Pelecinids are cool wasps: the overwhelming majority of them are female. (Can I just say here how little I ever expected to think that any wasp is cool??) The nice folks who gave me the ID also pointed out this site, which says that there are so many females that scientists wonder if the species manages to mostly reproduce without the males. Apparently, you mostly see them in late summer. And that's when I saw mine. At a city park. The article makes it sound like that might be less likely, but it's one of several "wild" parks in our area, with a lot of trees, so it probably looks like "woodland edges" to the critters that live there. I love our wild parks: just perfect for our nature study.

I haven't done it yet, but I'm planning to use this photo to put the Pelecinid Wasp in my nature book. It's just too cool to forget, and drawing it will help me to remember. Our walks are so nice. Even when we don't get our notebooks out, I always feel like it's time well spent when we get out and go look at nature.

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But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee:  Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.
Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? 
-Job 12:7-9

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Watching Our Birds

I've been working on improving our Nature Study, and we've been watching a number of videos from John Muir Laws to help us learn to be better observers. It's fun when the things that we've watched start to turn up naturally in the way that we look at things - in this case, just the birds that turn up around the house.

This Robin, for example. He turned up in our front yard, and the kids called me over to watch with him. We did a much better job of observing him - Hero spontaneously started using some of the techniques we've learned recently - and it was really cool to see how much more we could notice about him than what we did before.

We saw him run around the grass a while looking for food. They especially like the spots on his back, and thought that they look like a Creeper's face, so we dubbed him "Creepy". Which cracks me up, because he's so not creepy.

In addition to noticing his coloring, we also got to watch him eat, and (we think) mate -- with two different birds! And the kids were much more aware of the way that he moves: he was doing more running than the hopping that many of the other birds in our yard do. It was really interesting to watch both the bird, and also my kids as they applied the things that we've been talking about and learning over the past little while. I think that was my favorite part: seeing the growth that we're all having in this area right now.

Good stuff.

Into The Wild 8: Wetlands in Wisconsin

Materials for the Webelos Into the Wild pin, requirement 8: Learn about aquatic ecosystems and wetlands in your area. Talk with your Webelos den leader or family about the important role aquatic ecosystems and wetlands play in supporting life cycles of wildlife and humans, and list three ways you can help.


Learn about aquatic ecosystems and wetlands in your area: 

Watch a quick introduction to wetlands through the year:

Read about what wetlands are with Wetlands 101 from the Wisconsin Wetlands Association.
Look to see which wetlands are close to where you live.


Learn about the important role of wetlands in supporting wildlife and humans: 







List three ways you can help the wetlands:
Learn about ways you can help preserve wetlands.


Additional resources for Into the Wild, requirements 1 and 6 are here.

Odd Bits: Spring Birds, Audiobooks, and More

::1::

American White Pelican, courtesy WikiPedia

I've always had a hard time knowing what to do outside, but counting birds for the eBird project has become a favorite. So far this year I've seen ten species (and I didn't hardly peep a foot outside in January, because it was so miserable), and but surprise was that there are already American White Pelicans in the area this year. I looked them up, and they're not common in our area until closer to April, though it's not unheard of to see them around the area now, either. Pelicans are cool. They have a really distinct way of circling around overhead, always near our river. I like watching them; this year we'll have to see if we can't get down to the waterfront while they're there so we can watch some of the other things they do. Pelicans are fun to watch.

::2::

There's some cool free audiobooks out there. LibriVox has several of our favorites, such as Children of Odin, and The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Before Achilles. Those are some that the kids go back to over and over. This week, I found another free one that I want to have a listen to: Lafayette and the Revolution, about how a French Marquis came to be fighting in the American Revolution.

::3::

So, NASA's been finding planets around other stars for a while. I even had an app on my phone for a while that would show me things about them, before I deleted it in favor of language learning stuff. Now, they've found some cool ones: planets that might have water. And they're not even that far away. I need to figure out where Aquarius is, because that's where NASA says this Trappist system is located, and it'd be cool to know how to stare in their general vicinity.

::4::

The kids invaded and nabbed my electrical tape to enhance their sticks. The big guy has created a pilum; the small two immediately copied him, but theirs are swords, they tell me. It's really quite remarkable what a little electrical tape can do to a stick. And the things they come up with in "play"; I certainly didn't tell them to recreate ancient weapons. I just said to go outside to play! I'll be interested in seeing how long these stick around: they are carefully stacked outside the door, after I told the kids that their "weapons" were not allowed in the house.

::5::

I'm a Constitutionalist, and I learn foreign languages for fun: I believe that words matter. They have meaning and how you put them together is important. But it still sometimes catches me by surprise to see how big a difference it makes to change the structure of a sentence, even just a little bit. With a little bit of mindfulness, we can avoid teaching (or at least avoid reinforcing) ugly stereotypes by tweaking the way that we speak about groups of people: The "zarpies" example in this article is particularly interesting. Reading that article made me think of the research on teaching colors that I read a while back - the one that explained why color is so difficult to teach, and why kids often will take a lot longer than you'd expect to really get the hang of it. Turns out that some linguistic mindfulness will go a long way here, too.

Odd Bits: Happy New Year

Someplace to Help: 

One of my high school girlfriends had a house fire on Christmas Day. The whole place, and all their belongings, all of it a complete loss, including the family business that they ran out of the house. All their people and even their cat got out safely, but everything else is a total loss. One of their relatives set up a GoFundMe in their behalf.

Something Japanese: 

Last month, I read about how many words are used in various different languages. Apparently, Japanese is a heavy-hitter. But in most of languages, you don't need that many to say what's on your mind, only about 3,000 words. Which is not so bad. And it got me thinking: if I found a word frequency dictionary, then I could look for high-frequency words that I don't know yet. And I found one. Cool. Looks pretty straight-forward to use, too, which is even better.

Something of Nature: 

We've been sick a lot over the past while. Makes it hard to go outside and look at nature, which is already hard in winter around here! But it also gives us an opportunity to work on some of the seeing skills that are so important when doing Nature Study. And our current favorite resources are from John Muir Laws's website. We started with the Drawing Birds Tutorial, which has a lengthy video workshop. Both boys worked on that over a period of a couple of days, with plenty of drawing practice in between. Hero understands that it's drawing from a model that's the kind of art under study here, and he's been doing some lovely work. Dragon has been doing more drawing of super-heroes he's making up, but I'm happy with that, too. It doesn't speak exactly to the goals, but he's still developing the skills that put his ideas on paper, and feeling successful at it. I'm working on a Cedar Waxwing that will eventually be a watercolor painting  I've got my eye on the How to Draw Hawks workshop next, and want to spend some time browsing around his site to see what other goodies there are. There's a lot of them. Plus, he's got books.

Something Poetic: 

Have you seen this? I've liked I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day for a long time, but I hadn't realized there was such a moving story behind it. For a long time I thought I didn't much care for poetry. I had no idea what I was missing out on. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is one of the greats, but I hardly know anything about him. Clearly, this needs to change.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep...


Something Sacred:  

I've been messing around at learning Welsh for a while, and while progress is slow, there is progress. I always like to have scripture in the language that I'm learning, and decided recently that it's time to find some in Welsh. But the Church hasn't kept their editions up: Welsh was the first language that the Book of Mormon was translated into, and it hasn't even been put into verse format, and they don't offer a Bible at this time, either; I'm guessing that's because it's likely that nearly all Welsh speakers also speak English. But I want something to work with, especially if I can find something that's got an audio format. I found this version, which I think is the Morgan Bible and holds the same respect as English's King James Version, but if I try to read that, I'm almost certain to butcher the pronunciation... I need something to imitate. Audio. And I have to be able to find my way to whatever I find in English. I'm still hopeless in Cymraeg. But check out this 1588 Bible. It's beautiful. I wish my Bible was so lovely. I love illuminations. Looks like it might have a Latin introduction to a Welsh text. Gorgeous. Gonna have to keep looking around.

Into the Wild 1 & 6: Mississippi Flyway

I'm helping the boys in Hero's Webelos den learn about our local flyway for the Into The Wild pin. We're working on requirement six:

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Learn about the bird flyways closest to your home. Find out which birds use these flyways.

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Turns out there's a couple of main traffic routes that the birds like to take when they migrate: flyways. We'll be learning about the Mississippi Flyway, which is green on the cool little map I found.




There's a lot of birds during migration:






 Then we can explore this chart of when birds arrive in different places, so that the boys can figure out what birds are using our flyway.

If we have time, we can also work on requirement six:

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Identify an insect, reptile, bird, or other wild animal that is found only in your area of the country. Tell why it survives in your area.

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The DNR has a PDF that the boys can look through that lists our State's endangered species, and also how these species are doing globally, so that they can quickly determine which of our rare species are rare all over. Once they've picked a species to focus on, then we can learn about them, and what makes them like it here.

Additional resources for Into the Wild, requirement 8 are here.

Birds of Prey Eat Fish

When the things we learn about show up in the kids' play, I know the learning is sticking. This time, for the first time, it's Dragon initiating a game about something from school. I'm loving that!

Dragon has decided that Ospreys are the coolest birds around. He asks me, daily, to show him this clip:

He particularly loves the part where the Osprey shakes itself. We also check in on Cornell's Osprey nest cams. They actually also have a second nest with cameras on it, so we peek at both. We look at the Red Tail Hawks that just hatched, and keep an eye on the Great Blue Herons, and Bald Eagles (they have eaglets already!) but Dragon likes the Osprey best.

I recently got a new sewing machine, and have been making a series of small projects, exploring that capabilities of my new toy tool. One of the first thing was a set of monsters, one for each kid. The boys helped make them, and Hero actually did quite a bit of the work on his (on the right).

When we started watching the Ospreys, Dragon asked me to make him a fish, so that he could be an Osprey. No problem. Happy to do it! And so I did. It was fun. Of course, then Hero had to have one as well. My new machine isn't (technically) an embroidery machine, but it sure does have some nice decorative stitches, which I put to good use on these fish.

The boys decided that they "needed" fish. After all, birds of prey eat fish. They look pretty happy about the new meals. I like it when they like the things I make!

Visiting the Hive

Our bee-keeping friend invited Hero to come to the hive again if he wanted, which he did. Hero decided that it was cool enough to do again, and that he wanted to show his Daddy what it's all about, so we went again. This time we were better prepared: long sleeve shirts, long pants, and hats to keep the bees out of our hair. Also, I had my camera and the long lens ready to go. And our bee guy had bee gear for Hero! It was awesome.

First, we saw the hive all put together. The lid is slanted to allow ventilation, and the rock on top keeps the lid from blowing away.

The bees have a little door they like to go in. Turns out there are several openings they could use, but this is the one they like. They were pretty active when we got there; much more so than last time. Maybe because last time we visited it was evening, and as the sun set the bees wanted to go in and do whatever they do at night, and this time we were there mid-morning. In any case, there were quite a few of the little critters buzzing around before anybody even got close to the hive.

Our friend helped Hero into some bee "armor" so that he could go right up to the hive. It was older equipment, but it still did the job. Hero was pretty excited when he realized that he was going to be right in the thick of things this time!

Next, they started the smoker. Bees don't like smoke, so it's useful when working with them. They were burning twine in a cool little can with a mini-bellows on the back side of it, which Hero got to try out. Since I was pretty sure that he'd never seen a bellows before, we also mentioned that a larger version of a bellows was what Nephi used when he was building his boat.

 

The bee man continued to take the hive apart, and he showed Hero everything as he did so. Honey and pollen, drones and "house bees" and wax caps on the frame, and all sorts of cool stuff in there.

When you look at the hive, you can see that it's made out of several sections, and it turns out that the various sizes of sections have different purposes. The top ones are a little smaller, and they're called "Supers." It always kind of amazes me how the bee man just sticks them on the ground, and it doesn't seem to disturb the bees too much. Even with them on their sides. Bees are cool that way.

Pulling the trays out (I forget their right name) also doesn't seem to bother the bees too much. At least, not from the super area. I think on this tray he was showing Hero a drone, but I can't remember for sure. I think it's cool how Hero was able to be right there, nose to nose with the bees. I'd kind of like to see up a little closer, but with only the one extra suit, that wasn't an option this time.

Now he had all the supers off the top of the hive, and they were down to the little skinny layer. It's called an excluder, and its job is to keep the queen down in the bottom section of the hive. That way, the queen only lays in the bottom sections, and the honey and wax in the top is ready to be harvested at the end of the season. It's harder to see at this  resolution, but the excluder has a sort of screen on it which is large enough for the worker bees to get through, but too small for the queen.

At this point, the bees are stirred up enough that they've made a pretty good cloud around the two of them, and you can see all the bees buzzing around them in this picture. Hero was hoping for a peek at the queen, which didn't end up happening this time. But he did see a bunch of larve, and the way that things work down here in the brood boxes below the excluder. The bee man said that it wouldn't be a good idea to disturb the queen too much, and that when they pulled the trays down here some of the larvae were going to die from being disturbed like this. But he wanted to check and see how much larvae were there, so they did have a peek.

Before the bee man removed the top brood box to look in the bottom he pulled out his smoker and smoked the bees a little. It was really remarkable to see how the bees would go right into the box, away from the little bit of smoke as he moved the smoker over the top of the brood box.

 

The bees weren't doing that much with the bottom brood box; some of the trays were still empty. The bee man said that this was a good strong hive, but not an amazing one. He seemed pleased with how things are going.

 

Then, having looked the whole thing over, they started putting things back together. By this point, with their home completely disassembled, the bees had made quite a cloud around the two guys and the base of the hive. It was remarkable to see how quickly they went back into the hive as it went back together.

A few of the larvae had fallen out in the process, and the bee man figured they were going to die anyway, so he had Hero pick one up and bring it over for a picture. This is my favorite from the whole batch of photos from the day.

 

The larvae are kind of icky-looking. I guess that's not surprising, since they're squishy bug larvae. But that didn't seem to bother Hero at all. He brought it right over so that we could see. I'm a little entertained, since he won't touch worms or frogs, but didn't think twice about grabbing bee larvae. Maybe it's the gloves.

Having put it all together, they stayed and watched the bees go back in for a while. This was when we learned that there's another hole on the back of the hive for ventilation. The bees could  use it for a door, but mostly they just like to go in this front door.

Especially considering that most of the trays were never taken out of the hive, it was somewhat remarkable to see how many bees were headed back inside now. The cloud of bees rapidly shrank as they all went back home.

 

Once again, he kindly invited Hero to come back again another time. He plans to harvest the honey Labor Day weekend, so maybe we'll be able to help out with that a little. He'll come out and take the supers off for the winter, and take the honey and wax out of them. Watching them working with the bees was fascinating. The bee man had some other hives that he was headed to have a look at, so we said thank you and let him be on his way.

Nest Cams

Last year, we had a good time watching Wing and Beau and their babies in this nest cam. It sparked quite a bit of learning about Barn Owls, and we're looking forward to watching their nest again this year, though they're not doing anything much yet.

The Decorah Eagles, though are sitting on 3 eggs, the first of which is expected to hatch next Friday. We're pretty excited about that, and check in on them regularly. Dragon loves to watch the eagle. He sits on my lap and signs "bird bird bird" over and over before getting down and running off. We'll probably visit our local eagles' nest again this spring too. That was fun last year.

We also have a new nest we're keeping an eye on: Red-tail Hawks on the Franklin Institute. They just laid their first egg yesterday, so we'll get to watch this one for a few weeks before hatching and then the babies! The baby birds are Monkey's favorite part.

Mohenjo-Daro and Some Critters

We've been reading about the Indus River civilizations this week, and it's very interesting. Mohenjo-Daro is a fascinating mystery! In addition to the city itself, as we've been reading there's some other, slightly more mundane things we've come across that needed explanation so that Monkey would understand. I love You-Tube for this sort of quick clarification - and he loves that he gets to watch a little "movie" for school.

This one is an artist's idea of what Mohenjo-Daro may have been like.



This one shows a tour of the ruins.



When we were talking about water buffalo, Monkey was surprised they weren't water animals. Clearly we ought to look at some of those! This one includes a rhino as well, which is nice, because we read about them last week, but didn't go look for any clips.



And here are some domesticated water buffalo.





We also read about camels.

Flamingos are Cool

Birds of Prey Lapbook

We're just about done studying animals for now, and I offered Monkey the option of doing a lapbook for birds of prey, since they are his favorite. He thought that was a good idea, so I'm gathering up the parts and pieces I'll need. Since we spent so much time on them, and this is intended to be a review activity, I'm planning to do a larger book than we've done for our first two. He goes back to look at the frog lapbook we did, and thus it gets reviewed and remembered better than it would otherwise have done - I like that. And he likes to look at his completed work. Lapbooks, as a type of narration, make me happy.

Birds of Prey lapbook parts - they have a great cover sheet, and I Printed several of their lapbook elements.

We found this great owl mosaic idea that I think we might have to try; it's right up his alley!

I printed several of the elements from this owl lapbook site.

I also printed some of the eagle lapbook elements.

Wish us luck! This will probably take some time to put it all together, but I'll see if I can't get pictures posted when we have it done.

Nature Study for a Patch

We recently discovered that the state parks have a program where kids can earn a patch. Way cool! My husband has infected us, and now we're a bunch of patch geeks. Monkey was so excited, because he earned a patch that is his alone - none of the rest of us are the right age to get it. It took 2 relatively intense days of doing guided nature study with their booklet, but he got the patch!

Weekly Wrap-up: the sick, rainy one

This little cutie has been pretty miserable all week. I figured that was long enough and took him in today, then we stopped at our favorite pharmacy and brought home a collection of medicines to help him feel better. I'm looking forward to that "feel better" part! Though he's such a sweetie, even feeling rough. With him feeling icky, and it's been raining, we didn't really get outside all week. Everyone is a little stir-crazy, but some weeks are like that.

We finally have success with a lapbook! Monkey did a frog lapbook. This is the front and back sides, below that is the inside. The folder is hole-punched, and I trimmed the top and bottom just a bit, so it will fit in our science binder with all the rest of his work. He's pretty pleased with it - particularly that "Frog Facts" book that spins. I think he'll like this sort of thing even better when he can read the stuff himself. He asked me to read it to him over and over.

This week, in history, we were reading about ancient agriculture, and the book was talking about the benefits of shattering vs. non-shattering wheat. And Monkey wasn't getting it. We clearly needed something a little more hands-on than what we were getting from the book alone. So I drew a picture, so he'd know what a stalk of wheat looked like. Then, I took a little bit of our wheat kernels and dropped them on the floor. The mat was in need of sweeping, so I dropped them there, and I asked Monkey to pick them up. He thought it was pretty funny. We talked about how, if we had lived in those times, it might have been one of his jobs to help pick up the wheat kernels that fell so that our family could eat. He thought playing with legos sounded nicer, but now I was pretty sure that he was understanding the material, and understanding what a good thing it would be to start to have wheat that would stay on the stalk!

Another thing that is going extremely well this week is math. This week is the first week that we're doing more, officially, with the cuisenaire rods than just playing with them. And I love them more each time we have them out! This sheet is similar to one that Math Expressions uses: you take turns dropping a paperclip or something (today it was a Power Ranger) on a problem. Then you solve it, and each person has a wheel they color the answer on. First person to color all their spaces "wins." Monkey has asked for these "water wheels" for three days running now. I'm OK with that: they're great practice on his addition facts. And, since he's doing so well with the regular stuff, we're starting to explore "tricky" ways to do things. I was so pleased when the second problem he made up ended up being 8+1=3+6!