Preparing For December: Nature Study

Today's post is a mix of ideas and reminders.

In anticipation of turning the calendar to a new month, I am making up my to-do lists and preparing my new 2011 calendar for its binder. (If you are looking for a wonderful organizational tool/planner/calendar, you might want to check out Mom's Tool Belt.)



Here are a few nature study related things I added to my calendar:
1. Make some of these birdfeeders for our backyard.
2. Work on the plans for our new flower garden....color, color, color.
3. Finish identifying and recording my Yosemite wildflowers from last summer and put them on my Yosemite Wildflower blog.
4. Keep track of where the sun rises and sets in December along with my son's astronomy course.
5. Go snowshoeing with my husband, at least once.


I added on my Outdoor Hour Challenge goals for December:
1. Finish updating the Winter Nature Study ebook from last year and build my Winter Series Squidoo page for extra items. (I am updating the calendar dates and the broken links on last year's Winter ebook.)
2. Finish the notebooking pages for the Winter Wednesday series...I decided this would give us something new to use for our winter nature study even if we had already completed this series before. You can see some of the new resources on my Winter Wednesday Squidoo page that I am working on as well.

Big Reminder!

Today (11/30/10) is the deadline for posting your November World links in Mr. Linky for the last Autumn Series challenge before the drawing for the giveaway tomorrow. If you do not have a blog but would like to enter the drawing after completing your November World nature study, you can email me a little note about your outdoor time and I will enter you into the drawing...make sure I get your email today. Send to: harmonyfinearts@yahoo.com

Also, Many of you may not be aware of some of my additional resources related to nature study so I will link them here for you to take a look at when you have a minute.

Drawing With Children-Nature Journal Style: Complete plans for working through this book and relating it to your nature study.
Nature Journals: Some simple ideas for nature journals and some helpful links.
Harmony Art Mom: If you would like to see all the resources I have written for Squidoo, you can look on this page.

Online Resources: Cambridge Journals Digital Archive

The Cambridge Journals Digital Archive is now available at the Wellcome Library.

JISC Collections has purchased in perpetuity on behalf of the higher education community the backfiles of all available Cambridge University Press journals going back to Volume 1, issue 1.
It includes 171 unique titles plus some earlier versions no longer current, published between 1827 and 1996. The available titles include Genetical research, Epidemiology and infection and The Behavioral and brain sciences.

Please note that one of the subject collections (Humanities and Social Sciences, part 2) will not be available until August 2011. That includes the 'history & philosophy of science' titles, such as : Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, British Journal for the History of Science and Science in Context.

Author: Victoria Sinclair

First Snow

London's first dusting of snow fell this morning.

Aesthetica December/January Issue out Today

We’ve introduced some new sections into this issue, as well as more features. You’ll also get a FREE DVD of emerging filmmakers with the Aesthetica Shorts 2011 DVD.

In art, Aware: Art Fashion Identity opens at the Royal Academy and examines this multi-faceted relationship. We survey four contemporary Greek sculptors’ works in conjunction with Greece’s network of histories and recent economic climate. David Spiller renegotiates the label of Pop artist with his new show at Beaux-Arts London. This Must Be the Place interrogates location in the context of street photography. And French photographer, Gilles de Beauchêne creates interplay between fine art and advertising.

In film, we present the finalists of the Aesthetica Short Film competition, and celebrate how they are driving the genre forward. Elliot Grove from Raindance offers part two of his guide to Budget Filmmaking, and we have included reviews of the latest DVDs. In music, French Horn Rebellion chat about their debut, while we engage with the sounds of Chiptune (read the article to learn more).

Writer, Dinaw Mengestu re-invents the past with his new book, How to Read the Air and Rula Jebreal discusses her text, Miral, now a major motion picture. In theatre, we examine the democratisation of performance, and finally, Alan Haydon from De la Warr Pavilion discusses the impact that changing economy has the arts.

Get comfortable, we’ve got you covered throughout the festive season.

Please visit a stockist near you or our online shop.

R.I.P. Robin Day R.D.I.

Left, poster by Robin Day for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, ca. 1954. Wellcome Library no. 32584i

Probably everybody reading this has at some time sat in a chair designed by Robin Day, the designer who died on 9 November 2010 aged 95. His stackable plastic chairs, and their derivatives, are ubiquitous in British schools, hospitals and office meeting rooms.

However, he designed more than chairs. During World War II he designed posters for the Ministry of Information, and in 1951 signage for the Festival of Britain. The Wellcome Library holds posters which he designed for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.

The poster above, possibly from 1954, shows the danger of alighting from a bus of the open-platform type which is scheduled to be reintroduced in London this time next year. Three different lettering-types are used to describe the three activities involved: waiting (leaning backwards), the bus trundling onwards (cursive), and the final emphatic stop (sanserif caps bold in white on black, and boxed for good measure). The man alighting looks like a self-portrait of Day himself.

Right, poster by Robin Day for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, ca. 1954. Wellcome Library no. 32585i

This film noir-type poster (right) about the rewiring of an electric plug shows an early bid in the interests of safety to reserve more work for electricians and less for amateurs.

As is the way with posters, both preserve fragments of social history within their overt message – such as the vanished three-round-pinned plug (still used in India).

See further Fiona MacCarthy's obituary of Robin Day in the Guardian, 17 November 2010, and Charlotte Higgins's account of a visit to him in the same paper, 18 November 2010.

Embroidered Frontal of Ann Macbeth

Illustration: Ann Macbeth. Embroidered frontal for the communion table (detail), St Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow, c1910.

Although Ecclesiastical embroideries have a long and traditional history in Britain, the nineteenth century saw a particularly enthusiastic reinvigoration of the partnership of craft and church. The trend could, in some respects at least, be traced back to the enthusiasm of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin for both a gothically inspired revival of the decorative arts in Britain, as well as a renewal of the partnership between the arts and the church.

Embroidery was seen as a perfect vehicle for ecclesiastical furnishings and vestments with its penchant for embellishment and use of precious and semi-precious materials. By the time of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, ecclesiastical embroidery was well featured and design work for this particular and fairly exclusive market was being produced by some of the leading architects and designers of the day. Ecclesiastical embroidery continued to be featured within international exhibitions throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century.

What probably gave this form of the craft its real push towards the ecclesiastical was the fact that it had become an early and integral part of the British Arts & Crafts movement, with William Morris himself providing elaborate embroidered altar fronts and vestments through Morris & Co, and included decorative and design work provided by Morris daughter May. That Morris was to include ecclesiastical embroidery within the remit of his largely domestically themed interior supply company Morris & Co, does tend to show the potentially lucrative and status driven market for church furnishings and vestments.

Through the Arts & Crafts movement came the concept of art embroidery which soon spread to the ecclesiastical market. A number of artists were commissioned to supply embroidered work for the church and indeed the church became an enthusiastic commissioner of crafts in many forms including embroidery. There was also another level of embroidery craft that supplied numerous churches and chapels throughout Britain during the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. Enthusiastic suppliers of amateur embroidery became the mainstay of a number of parishes. Some were designed by amateurs while others were copies of more familiar ecclesiastical embroideries. The moniker of amateur can sometimes be misleading, as the level of embroidery skills maintained by British women during this period was much higher than perhaps we would expect and in many cases could well be on a par with professional embroiderers.

Illustration: Ann Macbeth. Embroidered frontal for the communion table, St Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow, c1910.

During the first few years of the twentieth century Ann Macbeth who was closely associated with the Glasgow School of Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau styling, produced this embroidered frontal for the communion table of St Mary's Cathedral in Glasgow. It was featured in a number of contemporary magazines and is perhaps typical with the style that we have come to associate with the Glasgow School. It is a highly decorative piece that while coloured still maintains a good compositional control of both colour and narrative. The embroidery work itself has not been allowed to dominate the composition. This was often a feature with the work of Macbeth who produced embroidery that often played down fussy techniques and respected the initial decorative design work.

Macbeth was equally concerned with both domestic and ecclesiastical embroidery and her work tended to be similar in both respects. However, it would be fair to say that her church embroideries did tend towards the higher status end of her design work, as this Glasgow Cathedral frontal shows. In a future article Macbeth's equally considered and highly effective embroidery for the St Bartholomew Church in Haslemere, which was produced at roughly the same time as the Glasgow Cathedral piece, will be featured on The Textile Blog.

Often ecclesiastical embroidery is dismissed or marginalised in our contemporary secular world, in favour of domestic and ethnically derived work. This is a shame as much of the European high status embroidery work of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which often had large amounts of time and professional creativity spent on it, was designated for the church. These pieces reflect both an era and a particular style of embroidery work that gives us a valuable lesson in the high standard of achievement and creativity that could be found within the craft of embroidery.

Reference links:
St Mary's Cathedral Glasgow 
The country woman's rug book (Paragraph Press reprint series of craft & hobby handbooks)
Embroidered and laced leather work
Educational Needlecraft (1911)
Glasgow School of Art: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Ann Macbeth, Margaret Macdonald, Robbie Coltrane, Cathy Jamieson, Dalziel + Scullion
School and fireside crafts,
Victorian embroidery (The Victorian collector series)
Needlecraft Practical Journal #85 c.1910 - Ecclesiastical Embroidery
Butterick Art & Ecclesiastical Embroidery c.1898 (Metropolitan Handy Series)
Ecclesiastical Embroidery (Batsford Embroidery Paperback)
Embroidery in the Church
Clothed in Majesty: European Ecclesiastical Textiles from the Detroit Institute of Arts
English ecclesiastical embroideries of the XIII. to XVI. centuries

Wellcome Library releases an ITT for a Workflow Tracking System

If you’ve been reading our blogs regularly you’ll know about how the Library plans to transform itself into a groundbreaking digital resource, allowing access to much of the Library’s material in digital form.

As part of this program we’ve just released an ITT for a Workflow Tracking System (WTS). We’re looking for a system that will track and manage the processes around creating digital content – whether that content is digitised by us, digitised externally or born digital archival material- and automating that activity as much as possible.

Within the Library, staff who want to add content to our Digital Library will do so using the Workflow Tracking System. This means using the WTS to record that all digital content, e.g. digitised books or archival collections, has been created correctly, has had its descriptive metadata attached, is converted to JPEG2000 (or some other appropriate format) and is ingested into our digital object repository. The WTS will also create metadata encoding and transmission standard (METS) files. These will be used by the front end system to deliver digital content to our users.

Expressed simply, the WTS will play a critical central role in ensuring that all digital content that is destined for our Digital Library is created, quality controlled and ingested accurately and efficiently into the Library’s repository.

More November World Photos-Ice!

Another November world sort of post from my world to yours....it is cold, really cold but no snow as they predicted which makes me very thankful. I am not ready yet for the winter to hit as hard as they thought it was going to this past week.


It was 43 degrees when we left the car for our walk on the trail. It was late afternoon and the light was so pretty in the remaining colorful leaves.


The mornings are still very cold and the leaves all have pretty patterns of ice to observe if you look up close.


How about this one from our deck railing? Amazingly beautiful don't you think?


Another one that caught my eye.....lovely, just lovely.

As November comes to a close, so will my November World posts but then again, it will a December World.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Trust me, I'm an Archivist!

The current issue of Ariadne, the web magazine for information professionals, includes an article by three members of Wellcome Library staff. Trust me I’m an Archivist: experiences with digital donors describes some of our encounters with potential donors of digital archival material, both good and bad! Working with digital archives is an emerging field, so it is important for those of us involved to share our experiences with colleagues across the world.

The Wellcome Library is in the unusual position of being a collecting repository with no legal mandate to acquire archives. This means that we have to find other methods of persuading potential donors to give us their archives. So far, we have found it easier to persuade people to part with boxes of papers than their digital equivalents. Ironically, whilst there is no hurry to transfer paper based archives, which can often survive for hundreds of years with no intervention, it is vital that we acquire digital material as soon as possible. Degradation of digital data, rapid obsolescence of hardware and software, and the fragility of items such as memory sticks all contribute to the vulnerability of digital archives. The longer digital material remains outside the archive, the higher the cost of working with it, and the less chance of being able to access all the data.

More information about our work in this area can be found on the Library’s Digital Curation pages. We always welcome contact from others working in this field who wish to exchange ideas.

Exhibition's Shakespearean Tragedy

Here's what we knew and had known a long time in 1956: British films are dicey and a risk in US markets. Even the best of them were hard sells with no guarantee you'd be rewarded for quality product. Shakespeare adapting just set bars higher. The one actor/director who'd made success of that was Laurence Olivier with Henry V and Hamlet, yet those were ten years ago by 1956 and a rock-and-rolling generation since was not on record wanting more. Producer Alexander Korda had been decades trying to crash US markets and was nearest among Brit impresarios to have done so. His latest was Richard III as envisioned by Olivier and this time he'd recover at least part of his gamble on a comfortable front end. Being two million was spent on this Bard-tacular, shot in Vistavision and Technicolor, any monies got back quick were welcome. Korda made a devil's bargain with US exhibition's most implacable enemy when he sold premiere dibs on Richard III to NBC ... television, that is ... a major motion picture debuting free on the dreaded tube. The Faustian deal was sealed with the broadcaster's tender of $500,000 to Korda, an amount exceeding domestic gross on many a Brit-pic playing stateside ... and here was AK collecting it all in one lump, months prior to Richard III's American bow.

Hands were thus shook in June 1955, NBC pledging to unspool its expensive pageant just once, hopefully in January of 1956, and in color, more a symbolic (and publicity generating) gesture as there were only 25,000 sets in the country to see RIII that way. Korda meanwhile shopped for a US distributor to coordinate two-a-day roadshowing, these engagements to immediately follow NBC's broadcast. British executives, taking a tip from Walt Disney's successful "Disneyland," believe that a TV showing of a film stimulates movie attendance, reported TIME magazine in July, though The New York Times acknowledged there was many a Hollywood executive who'd give them an argument over that forecast. Korda's deal with NBC was not without precedent. He'd recently peddled The Constant Husband to them for a $200,000 first-run in America, though worrisome must have been fact that the comedy garnered poor reviews from tele-critics and saw no interest from theatres afterward. NBC's mission now was to get some of the RIII half-million back in sponsor buys. As of December, however, they were getting a cool reception, according to Billboard, so much so that Richard's proposed evening berth was rethought to maybe a daytime spot. Said the trade: The move would cut the price of the show to advertisers from its current selling price of $900,000 for primetime showing to about $450,000 for the Saturday afternoon airing. Despite said adjustment, a new year saw NBC still beating the bushes hard for advertisers to take it off the hook. One-shot spectaculars, surely what Richard III shaped up to be, were in doldrums generally, sponsors by now more vested in popular week-to-week programs with their loyal followings. NBC had to get Richard III on the air by a March 10 weekend, per promise to Korda. Would they have to do so without ad support?

General Motors came to the rescue in late January. They'd buy most of Richard III's real estate and interrupt the feature but three times to hawk automotive wares (per promise to Olivier when the deal was struck). GM's outlay was between $350-400,000 --- with the rest "sustaining" time picked up by NBC. Richard III was set to run on Sunday afternoon, March 11, 1956, opening later that night at New York's Bijou Theatre, a charity benefit attended by Laurence Olivier and other cast members (Toronto had a "North American Roadshow Premiere" on March 1). Ticket prices were apropos to hard tickets ... $1.50 to $2.80, with a $3.00 top on weekends. Richard III was figured to settle in for a long run, but exhibition watched warily. Would customers pay for a show they'd just had for TV Sunday dinner? Never mind sock business it had done in England since premiering there on December 13. They hadn't got Richard III in advance on tele's. Still, business was record-shattering over there, and despite highbrow content, hopes were high that RIII might score in the states. General Motors was sufficiently impressed to line up a mid-broadcast "talk" by Dr. Frank Baxter, Professor of English Literature at USC, who'd regale viewers as to matters Shakespearean during the four-five minute intermission. Does Baxter's name ring bells? He lent gravitas to, among other things, a series of Bell science films shown ad nauseum in schools, and even more notably, introduced later in 1956 The Mole People, warning patrons as to possibility of lost civilizations beneath the earth. Could GM have picked a better man to enlighten us?

NBC estimated that twenty-five million would be watching come March 11 (over 146 stations in forty-five states). So as not to offend, they'd remove three minutes from Richard III's two-hour and forty minute length, these including a decapitation, two children being suffocated, and Richard's extended death throes on Bosworth Field. The network would not, however, cut the word bastard from Shakespeare's prose. TV competition for that weekend was less than fierce, although CBS countered in part with a Ford Star Jubilee starring Bing Crosby, High Thor, "a Musical Production of the Maxwell Anderson Fantasy." That ran Saturday night of the 10th, and garnered ratings, if not positive reviews. Response to Richard III was more upbeat. Here was Olivier's best turn at Shakespeare yet, said many. Scribes wondered if a new era was being ushered in even as some expressed reservation over fitness of big-screen spectacles on TV, especially ones in Vistavision. The New York Times saw Richard III as compromised visually by twenty-one inch screens: The normal household distractions, such as a ringing telephone or a wriggling child, are also less conducive to complete absorption than the disciplined silence that prevails in a movie house. The black-and-white image viewed by an overwhelming majority at home was adjudged fuzzy and flat, though it was worth noting (courtesy Dr. Baxter) that more people saw Richard III (on television) than had witnessed all the stage productions since Shakespeare's time.

Many schools assigned Richard III as homework, pretty much blowing a weekend for kids nationwide (wonder how many still remember?). NBC would sound trumpets over record viewership approaching fifty million, which as of 1956, represented nearly a third of the country's population (The Motion Picture Herald called this figure unrealistic). A doubting press figured it for braggadocio, and wondered what fraction of viewers submitted to the entire three hours. Calmer reason suggested no more than twenty-five million hung in for the dollop. Still it was a fantastic number, as The New York Times acknowledged: Television has every reason to be heartened by the film's very substantial acceptance (and surely it was, judging by the NYT's own front page coverage). Buckets of Richard III publicity sallied forth. LIFE and Newsweek gave it covers and much coverage within. Theatres reported business slightly off during the Sunday broadcast, not an outcome appreciated by exhibitors. Lopert Films (a United Artists sub) was handling US distribution for Richard III. They claimed the TV run would only enhance business for theatres. Sourer notes were struck by Laurence Olivier, who called NBC's presentation deplorable. I'd been afraid of this, but the facts turned out worse than my fears, he said to The Washington Post. Advertising intervals, the network's mandated cuts, and a lack of size and color were chief among the actor's complaints (yet hadn't he signed off on the deal fully aware of these contingencies?).

Harrison's Reports monitored theatrical runs of Richard III and laid down home truths after dust settled. Poor Richard, wrote Pete Harrison in July, if any producer is still toying around with the idea of making one of his new productions available to television to be shown nationally over a major network before releasing it for theatre showings, the experience had with Richard III should make him give up the idea. Harrison noted the film's recent departure from the Bijou in New York after a run of eleven weeks and one day, during which business was generally below expectations, with plenty of seats available for most of the two performances given daily (previous Shakespeares Hamlet, Henry V, and Julius Caesar had lots longer runs). He branded Richard III a flop and warned that the effect of a telecast prior to theatre bookings is deadly rather than helpful. Showmen across the country shunned Richard III and punished a worthy product for having fraternized with free-vee. Overall figures were dismal. RIII brought back a frightful $43,000 in domestic rentals, later augmented with mid-60's bookings that realized an additional $9,000. Unfortunate outcome of all this was fact that so few audiences got to enjoy 35mm prints of Richard III, which having derived from Vistavision negative, looked spectacular. There were years spent in more-or-less lockdown, broken when Janus Films syndicated Richard III to television in the seventies, albeit trimmed to 138 minutes. Criterion would eventually offer a widescreen DVD, which was, among other things, complete and of stellar quality. Kudos to them for making this most visually spectacular of Shakespeare dramatizations available again.

A Walk in the Park

The last of autumn. Snow forecast this week.

Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh

Material from the Wellcome Libary is currently on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, as part of a landmark exhibition.

Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh explores the monumental artistic legacy of one of the world’s greatest literary epics: the 1000 year-old Persian ‘Book of Kings’, or Shahnameh.

Completed by the poet Ferdowsi in 1010 AD, this vast narrative poem (twice as long as the Iliad and Odyssey put together) charts the history of the Iranian world from its creation to the fall of the Persian Empire in the seventh century. It is an icon of Persian culture and has inspired some of the world’s most exquisite manuscripts.

To mark the passing of a millennium since the completion of the Shahnameh, the exhibition brings together nearly one hundred paintings from lavishly illustrated manuscripts spanning 800 years, amounting to the most comprehensive exhibition of Shahnameh art ever mounted in this country.

From its collection of Persian manuscripts, the Wellcome Library has loaned to the exhibition a nineteenth century folio depicting the second battle of Key Khosrow and Afrasiyab:

"Key Khosrow has crossed the Jeihun (Oxus) river pursuing Afrasiyab to his fortress of Gang Dezh. Afrasiyab comes out to meet him and battle is joined. Seeing the great loss of life, Key Khosrow goes apart and prays for aid, and a great wind rises to blow in the face of his Turanian adversaries. The army of Iran has the best of the battle and, with news of the approach of Rostam, Afrasiyab retreats to Gang Dezh.

The great wind is indicated on the folio with black clouds in the distance. The distant landscape is treated with aerial perspective, and colour is applied with a view to creating an effect of a European watercolour. Volume is indicated by variations of tone and by hatching, and shadows are cast. White highlights are applied – a feature more characteristic of oil painting than of watercolour. Many faces have suffered a damage: this is from a tendency of white pigment to flake, rather than from a deliberate attack, and it is observable on white horses also. The surviving faces have a passionate – albeit uniform - expression, with eyes rolled, brows contracted and eye sockets carefully shaded. Both commanders wear tall archaising crowns favoured by Fath `Ali Shah (reg. 1797 – 1834); these and other accoutrements and horse trappings are shown as liberally decorated with rubies and pearls". [1]

Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Sat 11 September 2010 to Sun 9 January 2011

[1] Brend B, Melville C. Epic of the Persian Kings. The Art of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. IB Tauris 2010

Author: Nikolaj Serikoff

Wellcome Library Insight - Designed Today, Gone Tomorrow

This week's free Wellcome Library Insight session - on Thursday 2nd December - explores aspects of design and social history through items from the Library's Ephemera collection.

Our Insight sessions offer visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. Sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

This Thursday's session starts at 3.00pm, and tickets are available from the Wellcome Collection Information Desk from 1.30pm onwards. For more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Image: Birthday greetings from five lactated food babies. Burlington, Vt.: Wells & Ricahrdson. Trade Card 1893 (EPH637)

Wellcome Library Workshops

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshops are:

Wellcome Images
Do you need a picture? Find what you need from Wellcome Images: search 160 000 pictures online, covering the history of medicine and the history of human culture from the earliest periods of civilisation to the present day.
Tuesday 30th November, 2-3pm

Pubmed and Pubmed Central: an introduction
Are you looking for the latest findings on diabetes or for historical research on radiology? Take a closer look at PubMed, one of the leading databases for locating research articles in the fields of health, medicine and dentistry. It contains over 15 million references back to the 1950s and is freely available to anyone with access to the internet. It is linked to PubMed Central, a free archive of life sciences journals.
Thursday 2nd December, 2-3pm

Our programme of free workshops offers short practical sessions to help you discover and make use of the wealth of information available at the Wellcome Library. Book a place from the library website.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

OHC Blog Carnival Submissions Reminder for the Month of November 2010

The end of the month is approaching and if you have completed and linked to any of the Outdoor Hour Challenges during the month of November, please consider submitting them to the OHC Blog Carnival. All entries from November are accepted whether they were from the Autumn Series or not.

The deadline for submissions will be Tuesday, November 30th, 2010. I will be trying to have the carnival posted on Wednesday, December 1st.

Here is the link to the carnival page: Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival. 

Looking up at Xmas

Seeing Xmas from a child's view

Men at Work #30

The dressing room of a Covent Garden performer.
The history of street performers in Covent Garden goes back to the 1600's. It is now one of the most prized spots in the world to perform. To get a spot on this patch you must pass an audition, pay a heft licence fee and be good at pulling the crowds in. Your time slot is generally only 40 minutes.

Birds in Our November World

Can you believe it is almost December? I thought I could fit in another November World post or two before the end of the month. It is surprising what you will see if keep your eyes open!

It has been really cold the last week or so and when I opened my blinds early in the morning a few days ago, this is what I saw at my birdfeeder.



Mr. Hummingbird.

We still have hummingbirds in our yard although the temperatures have been in the low 30s and the world has been frozen. Another day I saw some hummingbirds in my remaining lavender blooms in the front yard. One morning the feeder was frozen so I had to bring it in and defrost it and refill it with more liquid. Two hummingbirds come regularly and sit and feed for long periods of time and then they fly off. I am not sure if they are the same birds over and over or whether they are different birds migrating. So many questions....


Later in the day, this Northern Flicker (red shafted) caught my son's attention and he had to run in and get me to see it. Over the years Mr. A has become a great spotter of birds and I think it is because we have taken the time, one bird at a time, to get to know them and their habits.


The Chinese pistache tree in our front yard has little red-orange nuts on it this time of year. The local birds come here quite frequently and there seems to be quite a few migratory birds that stop by once or twice a year to enjoy the nuts. Here is a whole gang of different birds in the tree at one time.


One of my favorite colorful birds was visiting, the Cedar Waxwing.


Mr American Robin was there too making his presence known.


And don't forget Mr. Western bluebird. I see these just about every day now and I love them. We are thinking of finding a place to put a bluebird house for them to nest in but we need to do some more research about size and location.

November World birds seem to cheer even the coldest day up!

Remember that every entry in Mr. Linky for the November World Outdoor Hour Challenge will be entered in a drawing for a Moleskine journal and a $10 gift certificate to NotebookingPages.com. Deadline for entering the drawing is November 30, 2010. I look forward to reading your entries or you email if you do not have a blog. See the blog entry linked above for more details.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom