Good Bye Old Friend

One of my best friends went home to be with the Lord this week. Dick Warren was a remarkable man. and inspiration to me and others - I took this photo of him on a spring 08 visit to Shenk's ferry. It spoke to me then but I did not want to hear what it said.

KESTRAL

Sat 11/7/09 - I got as close to a Kestrel as I ever have today - I noticed it perched on a wire near our church school on Seighrist Rd. (West Hempfield Twp -Lancaster County, PA) As normal these sighting happen when I am WC (without camera). What was not normal is that after I fetched the camera and Florence (about 15 min later) he was still there.

Kestrels are amazing birds, the smallest of the falcon family, the are beautifully marked and fascinating flyers. They can hover in one place like a hummer and often will do this over an open field looking for the movement of a small rodent, their major food source. They will eat insects also.

I have seen them many times in the past but they are very leery of man. They will often fly from a perch as you approach and then perch again 20 or 30 yards away and will keep repeating this untill they get tired of you following them - then they fly out of sight. They often return to the same hunting grounds if they are successful.

This guy allowed me to get close enough for a good picture. (see above) Come to think of it I did get closer to a Kestrel once. I was between tours and taking a nap in the car waiting on the second bus - I awoke to discover a Kestrel perched on a fence post about 20 feet from me and of course I had no camera. I did enjoy the experience.

A beautiful visitor

A painted lady landed on our "picture window" today. The window is almost always warm with sunshine but it is Nov 6 an the temps have been below 30 at night but there she was - a bit slow but as beautiful as spring. On October 9th we released the last of our "butterfly heard" after our last butterfly program of the season - there were two painted ladies in that group and I am assuming that she is one of them. still to find her 28 days latter is special. She looked in very good condition no matter where she came from. Folks who know us know that we consider butterflies a gift and messenger from God so you may appreciate just how excited we were.

Last week the James Stricker family called to report the emergence of a butterfly from it's chrysalis. I hurried to their play and found a beautifully pristine black swallowtail - got lots of pics (see above) They had found the cats on there dill plants and brought them inside. Had they been left outside the black swallowtails would have wintered in the chrysalis emerging in the spring.

In the above pics the young man with the hat and the butterfly on his finger is Peter Strickler and the young man with the butterfly on his face is a guest of the Strickler's named Ben.

HAPPY NATURING !!!!!!

Where has the time gone?

It has been 10 months since our last blog - in that time we have built the web site (http://sites.google.com/site/creationappreciation/ ) and worked on allot of other projects. We designed the web site to replace the blogs but have missed writing about our nature adventures on a regular basis so we are back - I know that those who were reading this gave up on it as I was not posting new stuff but here we go again we will try to use this blog and the web site to keep you updated eventually the other two blogs (below) will disappear
[GODDIDITALL.BLOGSPOT.COM] & [CREATIONAPPRECIATION.BLOGSPOT,COM]