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Wildfire Pottery Showcase 2011

Here’s a postcard from our November 2011 Wildfire Pottery Showcase. We had a great turnout this year! 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2011051/Black-macaque-takes-self-portrait-Monkey-borrows-photographers-camera.html

Cheeky monkey! Macaque borrows photographer’s camera to take hilarious self-portraits. The crested black macaque started snapping away with award-winning photographer David Slater’s camera at a national park in Indonesia.

SOLSTICE SOLARGRAPHS: Last December, the staff of the Philippus Lansbergen Observatory in Middelburg, the Netherlands, invited members of the general public to join them for a solargraph-making party. A solargraph is a simple pinhole camera made from a soda or beer can lined with a piece of photographic paper. About a 100 cans were deployed around the observatory and, six months later, here are the results:

Each blue square shows the daily path of the sun across the skies of the Netherlands. The lowest arcs were traced by the winter sun of Dec. 2010. The highest arc was made by the sun just yesterday, June 19th, only two days before the 2011 summer solstice. Occasional gaps are caused by clouds.

“As you can see,” says a member of the observatory staff, “we had one of the sunniest springs ever in our province. It was even sunnier than in southern Spain!”

6-month Solargraph How-to Guides: #1, #2, #3

M-FLARE AND RADIATION STORM: June 7, 2011 at ar0und 0641 UT, magnetic fields above sunspot complex 1226-1227 became unstable and erupted. The blast produced an M2-class solar flare, an S1-class radiation storm, and a massive CME. A recording of the blast from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory ranks as one of the most beautiful and dramatic movies of the SDO era:

more movies: YouTube; 5 MB mpeg; 2 MB Quicktime

A video with commentary from solar physicist C. Alex Young of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center shows material splashing back to the stellar surface. “I’ve never seen material released this way before,” he says in the video. “It looks like someone kicked a clod of dirt in the air–an amazing, amazing event.”

Coronagraphs onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) are still monitoring the CME as it billows away from the sun. Watch the cloud expand. The speckles are caused by energetic charged particles hitting the camera’s CCD array. This is what we mean by a “radiation storm”; the particles were accelerated by the explosion and are now peppering Earth-orbiting satellites and spacecraft like SOHO

Eighteen of the 27 eggs hatched! Nine hadn’t. (I checked back over the next few days, and no more hatched.) Still, a group of seventeen chicks is a pretty impressive batch! We didn’t see the newly hatched chicks around the yard, though. My theory is that the parents brought them over to our neighbor’s bird feeder right away.

More quail families were to hatch in the yard later in the summer, but this was the only nest I ever came across. Pretty wonderful.

I think spring is here — the California Quail are nesting.

On Sunday, I accidentally found a nest while cutting back some old rabbitbrush about 20 feet from our house. The female didn’t move from the nest until I was almost done.

There is a tunnel into the thick Idaho fescue bunchgrass with a side area (for the male maybe?) and the nest. The nest is well hidden — it’s made of grass and has an arch of bunchgrass over it. There are 27 eggs in the nest! I was very upset that I had disturbed it. I quickly showed my husband Dave, recovered the area with brush and went inside to read about quail online for a couple of hours to assuage my guilt. I wanted to know if quail are very sensitive to nest disturbance. I didn’t find any information about that, but I did learn a lot more about California Quail:

From Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology:

Pairs generally form between members of the same covey, as early as February, depending on altitude and latitude. California Quail are generally monogamous, though in productive years, females may pair consecutively with different males. Nests are usually simple depressions on the ground, well concealed in rock or vegetation, and lined with grass.

Clutch sizes for California Quail vary very widely, from 1 to 28 eggs. Larger clutch sizes may result from “dumping” – that is, females’ laying eggs in nests that are not their own. No studies have explored the effect on clutch size of other factors, such as timing, location, or age of parents. Females generally do all the incubating; hatching is synchronized by vocalizations from the developing young while still in the egg.

We had a big storm that night and the replacement brush blew off. It was stormy on Monday as well. I stayed away from the nest area until Tuesday. At 3:30 p.m., when the day was nice and warm, I carefully crisscrossed two big juniper branches over the grassy clump and added more brush. The quail was not on the nest, so I took a photo and recovered the nest with the overhanging grass. I didn’t know if the female was off feeding or if the nest had been abandoned.

I couldn’t stand not knowing the outcome (I still felt really guilty), so I checked the nest again at 6:00 p.m., carefully pulling back the overhead grass. The female had returned to the nest! I quickly replaced the grass and went inside. Whew! Now we will leave the area alone for about three weeks or until we see a big covey of chicks.

Amazing — all of these stories unfolding every day whether we know about them or not, right outside the windows.

Here is a link to NASA’s Earth Observatory site showing satellite images of Mt. St. Helens over the last thirty years. It’s fascinating and heartening to see the regreening of the landscape after such devastation.

Be sure to click “play” below the big photo (on the NASA site) to see a slide show of the changing landscape over time.

The Indie Craft Show at Gossamer Knitting in Bend on Saturday was a success! The historic three-story industrial building was filled to the rafters with colorful work created by funny, creative and passionate artists. Sales were great, and I thank all of the friends and new customers who came by and said hi. Thanks also to Elizabeth at Gossamer Knitting, www.GossamerKnitting.com, and Sweet Pea of www.StuffMadeBySweetPea.com (great name!) for putting it together.

A special thank you to Rachel Carman , www.RachelCarmen.com, who put together a fabulous zine for the event. I love the cartoons of all of the sellers – it’s definitely a keepsake. Here are the artists who were there Saturday, courtesy of Rachel (that’s me in the first row, middle frame):