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I will be selling my wildlife calendars and notebooks through the Holiday Season for as long as supplies last.

In the past, I’ve used them for hostess and teacher gifts.  I’ve given the notebooks to kids with Storycubes or a writing prompt book.  Here are some pictures of the items I test printed.

 

The photos in both style calendars are as follows:

I’m also ordering 5.5″ x 4″  notecards, blank inside, with the bear, hummingbird, fox, eagle, and loon with chick, photos.  The price for 10 (2 of each image) will be $15.00.  Envelopes included.

 

For shipping, add $3.50.

To place an order:

1. Leave the Item(s), and number ordering in the comments below with your name only.
2. Tally your total due, remember to include shipping.  For more than 5 items shipping may be more.
3. I will reply to your comment when I’ve received payment and mailed your items, so you can expect delivery. Let me know if  you have any questions. And thank you for your orders!

 

 

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I swear, I’ve taken over 800 pictures of Hummingbirds this summer.

There isn’t a lot of days off, when you run a campground, but I do find an hour here and there.  Not usually enough time to head out in the kayak to see the loons, eagles or heron. But time to sit in my little corner of the front yard.

From there, I have a front row seat to the Honeysuckle bush. And Hummingbirds love Honeysuckle.

It’s fascinating to watch them flit here and there, to and fro.  Not a sound is made, but the branches of the bush dance below them from the sheer force of their flapping wings.

Sometimes, sitting quiet on the front lawn yields the best photos of all.

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Photographing Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds has become a bit of an obsession.  I sit on the front lawn by my honeysuckle bush for an hour here, and an hour there, hoping for the chance to snap a photo or two.

But they’re so darn quick!

At first I could only get photos of them sitting on a branch.

But then I graduated to some flight photos.  They still aren’t as clear as I’d like, but I’m hoping to learn as I go.

 

Did you know these delicate creatures weigh less than a penny??

Their hearts beat 600+ times per minute!  The normal beat for an average bird is 200!  For a human it’s 72.

And they need to feed every ten minutes or so to keep their energy level stabilized.

The way they feed, is by licking nectar three times per second. Try that with your next ice cream cone!

They’re fascinating in so many ways!

 

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……………………… Kathleen Rietz Illustrator, Desert Baths with author Darcy Pattison ……………….. Please welcome to Kid Lit Reviews a prolific children’s book illustrator and fine artist Kathleen Rietz. She is here to chat with us about herself and her new book with Darcy Pattison titled Desert Baths. Hi, Kathleen, let’s start off with what first interested [...]

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The days, oh—they have been something.  Yesterday, for example, began at 3 AM and ended at 11 PM, and included work on a bit of promotional poetry, a stint of science writing, a sudden and intense advertising copy session, a design review of a new think paper, and some finalizing touches on a complex technical magazine story for my Singapore client/friends. 

My hummingbird came near and stayed.

Miss M., my young and so talented dancing friend, sent a note I'll never forget.

My son invited me to dance with him.

I talked to a friend.

I think of all I did not do—the people I failed, the blogs I didn't visit, the messages I still owe, the questions I've not answered, the research I didn't do, the books I neither advanced nor read.


I am, I am afraid, perpetually begging forgiveness.

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click on each photo for a larger view	:)

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It's not perfect. I wish it were sharper. National Geographic wouldn't be impressed.

But all summer long I've been trying to capture one of these dear little creatures on film.  I have let the tulip vine grow messy with the hope of a seduction.  I have not brought the glads inside for the same reason.

Hummingbirds are easy, my friend Mike once said.  But hummingbirds have eluded me. I have waited years.

I have a family now.  This one's mate was just a white glad down.

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I have been reading Birdology these past few days, a book written by my dear friend Sy Montgomery.  Sy and I met years ago (virtually), following a review I wrote of her magnificent Journey of the Pink Dolphins.  We met in person a few years later.  I've read every one of her fabulous books since—Search for the Golden Moon Bear, The Good Good Pig, among them—and counted myself lucky to know this permeable woman who floats among God's creatures—chameleon like, inspirited, sometimes barely breathing, always awed.  Sy swims with dolphins and dances with bears.  She sleeps on the belly of a pig.  She speaks of her border collie, Sally, as if Sally had written a few books of her own.  With Birdology, Sy dances with birds.  She might swim with them, too; I don't know.  I still have two chapters to go.

I am myself a great lover of birds, and so I am loving this book with particular fervor.  In it, we meet the famous Ladies, Sy's crew of intelligent chickens. We walk, with Sy, through a dusky Australian park, hoping for an encounter with the bone-headed cassowary (six feet tall, dagger-equipped, footprints akin to the Tyrannosaurus rex, but Sy's not afraid, so we're not either).  We urge two orphaned hummingbirds on toward life, and learn, in the process, more than a couple of things.  We learn, for example, that two baby hummingbird's together "weigh less than a bigger bird's single flight feather," and that "a person as active as a hummingbird would need 155,000 calories a day—and the human's body temperature would rise to 700 degrees Fahrenheit and ignite!"  We go on a bloody falconry adventure.  (Blood, with Sy, is a rather commonplace sight.  She may have a mass of great blond curls, and she may be fashionably svelte, but don't let that fool you:  this is one tough, bug-bitten, leech-proven traveler.)

I was about to read a chapter about parrots—squeeze it in between client calls—but I thought, Oh, no, why rush this?  So I'm going to take this book outside after my work is done and pick my feet up and hope a hummingbird will visit in the meantime.

(As for the photo, above:  I snapped this gorgeous creature a few years ago while on Hawk Mountain with my friend Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, her boys, and my own.)

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Oh, the things we do for love.... Today's guest blogger, HUMMINGBIRD author Joshua Gaylord, reminisces about an adolescent crush and the impact of his affections more than 2 decades later.

In the ninth grade, I was in love with my English teacher. Her name was Carol Mooney, and what made her so irresistible was her belief that I was extraordinary --- a delusion which, when I discover it in people around me, never fails to raise them in my estimation. It was one of those classic student-teacher romances. I found reasons to hang out in her classroom before school, after school, during lunch. I offered to help her hang posters of the Transcendentalists on her walls. I made pathetic romantic overtures in my awkward fifteen-year-old way, and she tolerated them with grace and politesse. Far from trying to avoid the label of teacher’s pet among my peers, I flew that flag as though I had battled nations to win it --- and the result was that everyone eventually acquiesced to my right to the title, including Carol Mooney herself.

When Christmas came, she gave me a gift. It wasn’t wrapped, but it was contained in a brown paper bag, the kind I used to bring my lunch to school. Inside I discovered a book, a mass-market paperback copy of William Faulkner’s THE SOUND AND THE FURY. She had inscribed it to me:

for the gothic in you, J. Alden

J. Alden Gaylord was how I liked to think of myself at that age. It was the moniker of a portentous writer, someone who had so many names of such gravity that one of them had to be elided, and I was glad that she was able to appreciate the direction my future would take. I had not known before that I had any gothic in me at all, nor did I quite know what this meant, but I was pleased to discover that I could add this to the gradually accumulating list of things that made up my identity.

“It’s one of my favorite books,” she said, while I turned it over in my hands.

“How come we don’t read it in class?” I asked, suspicious.

“Most ninth-graders aren’t ready for it,” she said.

I took this as a winking acknowledgment that I was better than everyone else in my class, and I winked back. I understood. It would be our secret. We were like secret agents in the service of my awesomeness.

I brought the book home and immediately fell to studying it as though it were the Rosetta Stone of the adult literary world. If I could decipher it, it would be my key to untold poetic wisdom.

The cover showed a mansion on a hill, one of those neoclassical Southern-style homes with six columns in front and a porch balcony on the second story. There was a leafless tree reaching down its claw-like branches over the roof of the mansion, and a sky filled with black clouds that looked like a flight of vengeful specters. The whole picture had a distorted fish-eye quality that I would later come to associate with Thomas Hart Benton. Very sinister all around.

The cover also declared that this version of THE SOUND AND THE FURY was “The Corrected Text,” which made me feel like an aficionado, someone who could appreciate this particular brand of academic-sounding nuance. And the back cover claimed that this was the first “indisputable masterpiece” of this “central figure in twentieth-century literature.”

Surely, what Carol Mooney had given me was not simply a book, but Greatness itself.