Hummingbird Study: Our Outdoor Hour Challenge

This week we were on the lookout for hummingbirds as part of the Outdoor Hour Challenge: Hummingbirds nature study. We haven't had too many hummingbirds yet in our feeders, a few here and there that we have noticed. Summertime is hummingbird time in our backyard and we have several hummingbirds that perch on the tree behind our picnic table and in the evenings we see them sitting there watching us eat our dinner. There isn't much information in the Handbook of Nature Study on hummingbirds but it is enough to answer a few of our questions.

The hummingbirds we have in our yard are Anna's Hummingbirds and they are very pretty. They are green and pink and very fast flyers. They will soar way up high in the air and then suddenly swoop down.

The Handbook of Nature Study says, "Hummingbirds are not supposed to sing, but to use their voices for squeaking when angry or frightened." We often hear the male Anna's Hummingbird before we see him. He will fly up high in the air and then swoop down and make a chirping sound. They also make a sound as they sit on the branches of the tree...cuing us to look for his distinctive silhouette.

We found this video and now we are anxious to observe our hummingbirds to see if we think it is their tail that chirps.

There is always something new to learn.

I am fascinated with hummingbirds and our last trip to the desert was memorable because we visited a hummingbird aviary at the museum. I posted then about the hummingbirds.


Isn't he gorgeous?


This one was not shy at all and we spent a long time watching him fly and sip.



Here is a hummingbird nest that we collected a number of years ago. I am in awe whenever I look at the way it is constructed.


Can you imagine how small the eggs are inside this miniature sized nest? Amazing stuff.

One last thing to share from this week's Outdoor Hour time with the boys. We came across a very bold Spotted Towhee that let me come up fairly close and take a video of him singing his song. Enjoy.


Hope you enjoyed reading about our Outdoor Hour this week and our continued study of hummingbirds as well as any other bird that crosses our path.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Gold Country: Some Random Things to Share

Our part of the world is best known for being the place that gold was discovered in California back in 1848. We live very close to the South Fork of the American River and in fact, we spend much of our outdoor time in or around the water of this river. My parents live even closer to the actual gold discovery spot and have remains of an old town where the Chinese workers came to work in the mines and along the river.

The river was used for hydraulic mining which destroyed much of the habitat and you can still see remains of ditches dug for diverting water and piles of river rock where the soil was washed away looking for gold. The scars remain even today.

So much history left behind for us to explore and experience today.


This is an abandoned mine that we discovered on our regular hiking trail. This was taken a month or so ago and we were just there yesterday and it looks very different. The water level has dropped inside the mine and you can step inside a little to check it out. The water is not raining down inside as heavily either. The plants around the opening are getting green and somewhat covering up the entrance.


We took a hike to a different part of the river two weeks ago and it had lots of rocks that looked like this with the quartz encased in the other rocks.


This short video gives you an idea of what the rock and the river is like where we are. In the beginning of the video you will hear my husband's narrative....please know he was trying to be silly. Don't miss me almost falling into the river at one point... the rocks are hard to walk on especially when you are taking a video.


We had packed along our gold pans and the boys tried their hand at finding some gold. No luck this day.


The water was really cold and they decided there is a definite skill to panning. We wondered about the gold miners back in the 1800's and how they must have remained motivated by either their success or the success of others around them. It is back breaking work.


On another hike, we saw this guy alongside the river on the North Fork getting ready to start using his sluice box for gold mining. Here is an easy explanation of how a sluice box works. My husband has used one before and he says it just is an easier way to sift through the gravel looking for flakes of gold. He took a geology class where they actually did gold dredging in this river and he was surprised that there still is quite a bit of gold if you take the time to look for it.


I bet you don't see this very often. We have one place that we like to hike to along the river because it has a perfect spot for skipping rocks when the water is low. We went there the other day and for the first time we saw these signs posted everywhere. I have to do some research because as far as I know, this place is on Bureau of Land Management land which seems like an unlikely place for someone to post a mining claim. Anyone know how that works?
Edit: Here is a link to answer my questions: BLM FAQ

Well, I hope you enjoyed my little glimpse into the gold country around our house. It is something that interests my boys so we might just need to tackle a geology course and use mining as the basis for our study. We already have a ton of rocks that we have collected over the years to study and identify. I should look at it as a project.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Wellcome Images at the Picture Buyers' Fair, 2009

On 6 and 7 May 2009, Wellcome Images will be exhibiting at stand no. 18 at the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) Picture Buyers' Fair 2009, at the Business Design Centre in London's Islington. The team will be on hand to show how Wellcome Images can provide easy access to its huge diversity of material for publishers, designers and broadcasters.

Now in its eighth year, the BAPLA Picture Buyers' Fair is the largest event for image buyers in the world. It is a great opportunity to meet with over 150 image suppliers face-to-face in a world where 95 per cent of business is conducted online. Exhibitors cover every conceivable subject from news and nature to architecture and art with powerful, high-quality images and a vast fund of expertise.

Wellcome Images represents the unique collections of the Wellcome Library and is the world's leading source of images on the history of medicine, contemporary healthcare, social history, biomedical science and clinical medicine. There is historical material from all over the world, including Renaissance anatomical atlases, ancient Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscripts, beautifully illuminated Persian books and archives tracing groundbreaking discoveries in science.

Biomedical and clinical sciences can also be explored through over 40 000 high-quality images from photographs to scanning electron micrographs. Selected from the UK's leading teaching hospitals and research institutions, they cover science from genetics to neuroanatomy, disease, surgery and general healthcare.

Wellcome Images is online and all images are available electronically on demand. Call to arrange an appointment with one of our expert picture researchers at the Fair on +44 (0)20 7611 8348 or email images@wellcome.ac.uk.

Trio at Byng Place

Mummy Daddy and baby telephone boxes so you can all call home.

Walk into the Woods and a Picnic at the River

I am so far behind in recording our hikes. I haven't even touched the photos from two weeks ago when we did twenty-six miles of hiking. I am sort of in a slump about posting for some reason.

Here are a few photos from today's hike with the two older boys.

The trail in this section has grown over with greenery. You can still find a narrow path through the woods but it is just about covered up with grasses and flowers. Now that spring is here the trail is a whole different world.


The sunny area has a colorful display of wildflowers along the upside of the slope. The trail is pretty overgrown here as well. If you look carefully in the background you will see where a tree has fallen over the trail.


Here is the view at the one end of the trail. The river is really running fast and high. The sound as you round the corner is amazing. Soon there will be whitewater rafters and kayakers on the water. Right now the water temperature is pretty cold. The other day we had a glimpse of a boat full of rafters but they were wearing drysuits.


This is about the only new flower blooming along the trail that I noticed today. I think it is some sort of caterpillar flower.


Here is a close-up of this one.


Here are some flowers from a pretty part of the trail in a shady area. Just so pretty.

Monday we went on a picnic lunch...boxed up some sandwiches and bottles of water and took an hour or so to enjoy the opportunity.


The view from my picnic spot on a rock was very peaceful and I soaked up the sun. The sound of the water flowing by was relaxing and I could have sat there for a very long time but the men were anxious to move along. This is the same river that is in the photo above but this time we were down at the shore and down about ten miles.



I gathered a few rocks from my sitting spot and realized when I looked at the photo that the white rock looks like a heart.


The trail here is overgrown too....gorgeous.


Here is a photo I tried to take of the rafters as they floated by. If you look closely, you can see their blue raft behind the bushes.


The fairy lanterns are blooming thickly along this part of the river.

One last photo from yesterday's hike....lupine like I have never seen it before. It is a banner year for the lupine in our area.


The amazing thing about wildflowers that I have come to appreciate is that although they are randomly planted and grow pretty much wherever the conditions are right, they look just perfect. Better than any garden planting that I have every seen.

What a time of year for getting outdoors every day.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

One hundred years since the ‘Magic Bullet’

In 1909 Paul Ehrlich, working with his Japanese student Sahachiro Hata at the National Institute for Experimental Therapeutics in Frankfurt, discovered that the 606th substance tested in their attempts to discover a specific chemotherapeutic agent to cure syphilis, the arsphenamine compound named ‘Salvarsan’ did in fact destroy the spirochaete, treponema pallidum, which caused syphilis.

In the early years of the twentieth century this sexually-transmitted disease was a major public health problem: it had long-term lingering effects on the infected individual, and was also the cause of much disability in their offspring.

The discovery of Salvarsan was also an important breakthrough in the development of specifically targeted chemotherapeutic agents. It was rapidly taken up by the medical profession, replacing the previous much less efficacious treatment with mercury.

Its history is reflected in a number of archival collections in the Wellcome Library: the Paul Ehrlich transcripts include his work on arsphenamine, case-notes among the papers of Surgeon-General Knapp, RN (GC/85) show the early use of salvarsan trreatment in the Royal Navy, while Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s index cards of autopsies include some early deaths from toxic side-effects while dosage levels were still being worked out. These are also documented (with other material on Salvarsan) in the papers of Frederick Parkes Weber.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 the supply of Salvarsan (and the later developed Neosalvarsan) was cut off since they were produced in Germany. Substitutes – Kharsivan and Neokharsivan - were developed and manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome and Co Ltd. Further information can be found in the company records.

Contemporaneously, the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases (1913-1916) was hearing evidence on the best and most effective ways to bring this radical new treatment and sufferers together. Its reports and minutes of evidence are held in the Library.

Other items of relevance in the Wellcome Library, besides numerous printed works, include the 1974 BBC educational film The Search for the Magic Bullet as well as the famous Hollywood movie, starring Edward G Robinson (better known his gangster roles) as Ehrlich, Dr Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940).

Although it was replaced in the 1940s by penicillin, a treatment which took much less time and had far fewer dangerous side-effects, Salvarsan and its clones played a major role in the reduction of syphilitic infection in the UK between the two world wars.

Buttercups: Wednesday Flower Study

The Common or Field Buttercup-Handbook of Nature Study, pages 516-518

"The buttercups, bright-eyed and bold,
Held up their chalices of gold
To catch the sunshine and the dew."

"Common buttercups and daisies are always associated in the minds of the children, because they grow in the same fields' yet the two are so widely different in structure that they may reveal to the child something of the marvelous differences between common flowers; the buttercup is a single flower, while the single daisy is a large group of tiny flowers."

This sounds like a great way to learn about some common flowers in the garden.

We have a spot that we hike to that has a whole hillside of buttercups.



We didn't complete an in depth study this week but we did complete our observations and then a journal entry. I know you all must think that we spend oodles of time each week in nature study but in all honesty, some weeks we just *enjoy* getting outdoors without much preparation or follow-up.

I would rather we aim for making our outdoor time as regular as possible, have some focus to start off with, and leave things open and flexible if something happens to catch our attention.

Here is something we found on the trail that caught our eye this week. Butterflies!

I know this one is dead but it did give us an excellent opportunity to examine this creature up close.

The blue is iridescent in this swallowtail...so pretty.



This painted lady let me come very close and get a good photo. She was very busy sipping nectar from the wildflowers in this sunny spot alongside the trail.


We were watching these swallowtails for a very long time. I love to watch them flutter around in the sunshine as they gather their meal. Click to see this one better. :)

Our garden is coming alive with colors. I am not sure what we will study for next week yet.

Now is your chance to go outside and pick a flower to study from your yard. It does not have to be a buttercup but something that you can observe from your neighborhood. Pick your flower and then look it up in the Handbook of Nature Study. Come back and share your blog entry on Mr. Linky.

I always come by to read the entries.

Have a great flower week!
Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Bracketology ctd...

A great response to yesterday's post so here's the full bracket (click to see it full size) and the intro and comments I was asked to write. But please bear in mind that these brackets are more a starting point for debate than any definitive pronouncement. And for those who want more on brackets go to bracketsmackdown.com.

My intro:

Let’s start by saying American photography so dominates the medium as to make other countries’ contribution a footnote. So we’re really choosing the most iconic photograph of all times. And what are we looking for? A visceral image, one that is embedded in our cultural subconscious, one taken with the greatest skill by an artist whose entire body of work is capped by that one transcendent image that is totally unreplicable. One that you can close your eyes and it will come floating into the space between your mind and your eyelids with something between a shiver and a sigh of pleasure.

And comments:

Capa vs. Eisenstadt

Two indelible World War I images, one of war, one of peace, from transplanted European photographers who made their way to America to find fame. Capa’s picture was taken as bullets flew, Eisenstadt’s as confetti streamed down. Victory goes to the photographer who risked his life.

Link vs. Abbott

Two of the greatest night-time photographs ever taken, both technical tours de force. The Abbott is filled with the romance and promise of the big city, the Link with the romance of small-town America and wonder at man’s ingenuity. Link is schmaltzier, which means Abbott wins.

Lange vs. Leibovitz

Head to head go two female heavyweight contenders. Leibovitz’s photograph is not just about a famous couple but is the high-point of her sneakily conceptual imagery – pulling a theatrical gesture out of her famous subjects. Lange’s Great Depression image combining photojournalism and great portraiture has come to symbolize man’s dignity in the face of hardship. Lange by a whisker, if only because she came first.

Adams vs. Avedon

The uber-landscape against the uber-fashion photograph from two of the most controlled artists in American photography. Both pictures, while carefully set-up on large-format cameras, could have only been taken the split second they were taken. Both are perfect in every way. But such is the spirituality in Adams image that it even trumps a beautiful woman and an elephant.

Working Boats

Until as recently as the 1950's the majority of boats on the Thames were working boats. Now pleasure boats (a term coined by the working boatman) have taken over. As well as many passenger ferries.

Why Am I Showing This Picture?

My friend the super-agent Mark Reiter (he got Jack Welch $7 million for one book so I think that qualifies him as super) is in his spare time a master bracketologist. For those not in the loop, a bracketologist is a maker of lists of 32 items in a given category that go up against each other tournament-style to determine who is the champion of the field. Of course it helps if the list-maker has some credibility and so in his latest book “The Final Four of Everything” Reiter has everyone from film critic Manohla Dargis on the best Clint Eastwood films (Million Dollar Baby) to New York Times court reporter Adam Liptak on the best Supreme Court Decision (Brown v. Board of Ed). As a friend of the family I was asked to do "Iconic American Photographs" on which more later. But my advance copy of the book just arrived and I was pleased to see a number of other photo related lists.

The picture above, the famous shot of Raquel Welch from "One Million Years B.C." was the runner up to Rita Hayworth (below) in American Pinups as bracketed by Gregory Curtis, former editor of Texas Monthly.

Photo by Bob Landis.

Then there’s Celebrity Mugshots by Willie Geist – co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe – resulting in a showdown between Nick Nolte and James Brown.

While not included, this earlier mugshot of Brown from 1988 probably deserves an accolade for the most suave mugshot!

Anyway, back to my category – Iconic American Photographs. I’ll give you my final four and you can let me know which you would pick.

In alphabetical order:

Ansel Adams – Moonrise, Hernandez.

Diane Arbus – Twins

Richard Avedon – Dovima with Elephants

Dorothea Lange – Migrant Mother.

The book comes out next week at which point you can join the debate over Best American Wine, Best Political One Liners, Best Motherly Advice, Best Celebrity Baby Name, and 146 other bests (or worsts).

Centenary: Stacey Hopper, born 28 April 1909

The artist Stacey Hopper was born exactly 100 years ago, at Aberaman, now part of the town of Aberdare, South Wales, on 28 April 1909. Thousands of people will have seen his work without knowing his name. His claim to fame is that, in the role of cartoonist and illustrator, he saved many Allied soldiers in World War II from the horrors of such diseases as malaria and syphilis, and thereby played a part in the Allied victory.

Left: Mussolini and Hitler. Wellcome Library no. 583972i

The Wellcome Library has two collections of Stacey Hopper's works, one from the Royal Army Medical Corps and one from Stacey Hopper himself; the latter was acquired from his family in 2003, together with valuable contextual information about his life and work. Other works by him are in the Imperial War Museum and the National Army Museum in London.

Before the war, Stacey Hopper taught art in Ealing and was an accomplished caricaturist. In 1934 he published a caricature "The origin of the Nazi salute" which was reproduced in newspapers at home and abroad: it showed the Nazi salute evolving from the action of Hitler holding up a paintbrush when painting. Stacey Hopper was called up and joined the Royal Corps of Signals in August 1941, and was initially posted to Prestatyn, North Wales. In November 1942 he was among the troops sent to Algeria. There his artistic ability and sense of humour brought him to the attention of Major General Ernest Cowell, who asked him to help with health promotion for the Army Medical Department (the initials "AMD" appear on many of his works).

In Algeria the main problem was malaria. The disease was attacked in several ways. In the first place it was necessary to get into the minds of soldiers that mosquitoes were vectors of disease. As the Australian hygiene expert Neil Hamilton Fairley impressed on General Wavell, there was a danger of losing more men through malaria than through military casualties at the hands of Hitler and Mussolini.

These mosquitoes (right) discuss sucking blood from the troops as if they were ladies discussing tea at the Ritz.

Wellcome Library no. 584189i

Practical measures included blocking off the mosquitoes' breeding grounds, for example by excluding them from the latrines …

Wellcome Library no. 584263i

Another method was to spray everything in sight with "Paris Green" (copper (II) acetoarsenite), a toxic substance used as an insecticide …

"But he distinctly said - spray every drop of water and all the female adults".

Above: Wellcome Library no. 584264i

The medicine of choice against malaria was Atebrin, which was strongly supported by Hamilton Fairley and eventually replaced quinine as the main prophylactic against malaria. However, compliance was so difficult to enforce that eventually officers were ordered to place the pills in the men's mouths themselves. This exercise (below) in the style of H.M. Bateman refers to Atebrin.

"Tablet day -- the man who forgot". Wellcome Library no. 584428i

In November 1943 Stacey Hopper was promoted to Second Lieutenant and took part in the invasion of mainland Italy. Some wash drawings by him in the Wellcome Library record the bringing of casualties by air from the Anzio campaign in Lazio to Capodichino airport near Naples. This example, dated Naples 1944, shows the wounded being carried by stretcher-bearers into a tent where they are served with mugs of tea by the Red Cross. A lot of casualties are anticipated, for the first arrivals are being laid down at the back of the tent, and the tea urn and a quantity of mugs are on a table near the front. After tea, they were taken by ambulance to military hospitals for treatment. Above left: Wellcome Library no. 583973i

As the troops fought their way northwards towards Rome, Stacey Hopper's artistic skills were again called on to protect the troops, no longer from malaria but from typhus and dysentery.

Left, Wellcome Library no. 585129i. Above, a detail from it.

Right: Wellcome Library no. 585148i

And as Italians went over to the Allies in the areas liberated from the Axis, thought was given to Italian women who were infected with sexually transmitted diseases by Allied soldiers. Right: Wellcome Library no. 585150i

It was also now in the Allies' interest to make sure that Italian cooks recruited to serve the troops obeyed the stricter hygiene regulations that were required when catering for large numbers. Left: Wellcome Library no. 585122i

Having returned safely from the war Stacey Hopper returned to his pre-War profession as a teacher of art, at first in Ealing in West London and later in Somerset. He also continued to produce caricatures for publication, especially of popular entertainers and of actors in the West End theatres: his work was published in the Musical Express. He died in Bristol on 6 February 1996.

Works by Stacey Hopper are in copyright and are reproduced here under a licence granted to the Wellcome Library.