Get to know your birds...

 
....whenever you see one you don't know, look it up in the guidebook you keep on your kitchen shelf. 

On Sunday I stopped at the Traveler Restaurant (and bookstore, Exit 74 off I-84) in Union, Connecticut.  This place is about 2/3rd of the way between NYC and Boston and I've been stopping here for decades to eat, rest, then browse the used bookstore in the basement where nearly always some treasure is to be found (along with the free book you can select upstairs).  I found these nature guidebooks from 1917 for $8 each.  Neltje (Nellie) Blanchan was the Roger Peterson of her day with her writing known for its "synthesis of scientific interest with poetic phrasing".  Here are the illustrations of some of my favorite locals with excerpts from her descriptions.....

The robin:  "No bird that we have has so varied a repertoire as Robin Goodfellow.....Indignation, suspicion, fright, interrogation, peace of mind, hate, warning to take flight----these and a host of other thoughts are expressed through his flexible voice."

The mourning dove:  "No sympathy need be wasted on this incessant love-maker that slowly sings coo-o-o, ah-coo-o-o-ooo-o-o-ooo-o-o, in a sweetly sad voice.  Really he is no more melancholy than the plaintive pewee but, on the contrary, is so happy in his love that his devotion has passed into a proverb."

Find one and you will surely see his/her love nearby.....

The tufted titmouse:  "A famous musician became insane because he heard one note ringing constantly in his overwrought brain.  If you ever hear a troop of titmice whistling peto over and over again for hours at a time, you will pity poor Schumann and fear a similar fate for the birds."

The loon:  "A mirror-like lake in the Adirondacks or White Mountains is ever a loon's idea of paradise."

You can hear their "long-drawn, melancholy, uncanny scream (that) seems to rend the very clouds" here. 

The mockingbird:  "His love song is entrancing.  "Oft in the stilly night," when the moonlight sheds s silvery radiance everywhere, the mockingbird sings to his mate such delicious music as only the European nightingale can rival."

The passenger pigeon (so sad, a long excerpt...):  "The wild pigeon no longer survives to refute the adage, "In union there is strength."  No birds have shown greater gregariousness, the flocks once numbering not hundreds nor thousands, but millions of birds; Wilson in 1808 mentioning a flock seen by him near Frankfort, Kentucky, which he conservatively estimated at more than two billion, and Audubon told of flights so dense that they darkened the sky, and streamed across it like mighty rivers.  The modern mind, accustomed to deal only with the pitiful remnants of feathered races, can scarcely grasp the vast numbers that once made our land the sportsman's paradise.  Unlimited netting, even during the entire nesting season, has resulted in sending more than one million pigeons to market from a single roost in one year, leaving perhaps as many more wounded birds and starving, helpless, naked squabs behind, until the poultry stalls became so glutted with pigeons that the low price per barrel scarcely paid for their transportation, and they were fed to the hogs...........The passenger pigeon is today as extinct as the great auk."

Spring hike, via the aqueduct

ahead

behind

Happy Easter from Happy Valley...

I just returned from visiting my kids in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, the region around the town of State College.  Nobody seems to know why this area is called Happy Valley but the town does seem to "talk the talk"....

A little closer to home, here are a few more pics from Pioneer Valley, in western Massachusetts.  Specifically, these are 19th century tobacco barns near Deerfield.  In the 1860's, Deerfield was the leading grower of tobacco in the nation ---- this old wood seems almost spiritual.

All the door panels are thrown open when the tobacco leaves are drying.

Finally, there is a new museum, the Flynt Center of Early New England Life in Deerfield that displays a large collection of 18th to early 20th century decorative arts.  Here is one piece to give you a flavor....it is a wool "bed rug" from the late 18th or early 19th century, in a Tree of Life pattern, based on 17th or 18th century Indian palampores.  What is interesting is that William Morris was inspired by the very same fabrics and patterns later in the 19th century (see this post here)......compare to his wallpaper pattern below.

What you see here is about five feet across.

Morris Pink and Rose wallpaper (1891)

Some Very Elegant Stained Glass

love the lavender

victorian pot house?

easy pattern to trace/reproduce

All of these antique windows (and many more) are for sale at Age of Elegance, a store run by David and Julie Vezmar in Mill Valley, California.  I wonder if they know anything about the "Case of the Missing Burne-Jones Windows"?   I'll ask them.

Some other stained glass posts:

Climate Change and Stained Glass Windows
More Stained Glass...
William Morris Stained Glass

Snowflake House, Deerfield Massachusetts

I saw this cool old house in Deerfield, Massachusetts, this past weekend.  How did such a house come to pass?  Did the future owner say to the builder "I'd like to have a circle of snowflakes around the entire house.  Can you do that?"  (Pan to builder rolling his eyes.)  Or maybe this was one of four homes in some early version of a planned development (Quail Hollow Estates?  Running Brook Farms?) and the other three seasons burned down---maybe robin, flower, and leaf?  It would certainly be a perfect house for Snowflake Bentley.  The colors are lovely, especially the red sashes, and the front bay window must look wonderful from the inside.

And speaking of snow, there was a nice essay posted the other day about the evolution of Morris's socialist philosophy by a blogger named "Snowball".  The blog's subtitle is "Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution," a quote by Georg Lukacs, the founder of western Marxism.  Now I can't say I understand this quote at all, or even know what western Marxism is --- in fact, historical materialism sounds more like the life philosophy of a certain class of serial renovators, people possibly also obsessed with "bungalow style".   Snowball, in his post, quotes Fiona MacCarthy: "Early in 1883 Morris crossed the "river of fire" and became a revolutionary socialist........This final transformation of the cosseted son of the capitalist classes, whose family fortunes derived from copper mining in the valley of the Tamar, was described by EP Thompson, the historian of the English working classes, as "among the great conversions of the world"."

William Morris was so frigging great at everything he did!

Would you like some lace with that designer?

Charles Locke Eastlake

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Frank Lloyd Wright

Charles and Henry Greene

Gustav Stickley

Charles Voysey

All these and more at Cooper's Cottage Lace.

$5 Worth of Week Long Sunshine

One bunch of daffies + some random greens that don't want to die = two bouquets + me feeling a little better about the fact that it's still snowing.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.  Here is my testimony to Marie Tharp (1920-2006), mapmaker and artist extraordinaire, whose  transformation of oceanographic sonar data into detailed drawings of the ocean floor changed the way the world viewed the Earth's surface and paved the way for the acceptance of plate tectonic theory. 

Tharp's famous 1977 map of the world's ocean showing the largest continuous mountain chain on the planet, 40,000 miles long.

early sketch of Atlantic sea floor

In her own words:  "Not too many people can say this about their lives:  The whole world was spread out before me (or at least, the 70 percent of it covered by oceans).  I had a blank canvas to fill with extraordinary possibilities, a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to piece together: mapping the world’s vast hidden seafloor.  It was a once-in-a-lifetime—a once-in-the-history-of-the-world—opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1940s.   The nature of the times, the state of the science, and events large and small, logical and illogical, combined to make it all happen."

sketch of Atlantic off of Spain

You can see how the topography contours (bottom half) emerged from the ship track data (top half).  Imagine doing this for the entire ocean.

Copies of Tharp's maps can be purchased at Marie Tharp Maps.

Jean Nouvel's Desert Rose Museum

(click to enlarge)

This sublime (and virtual) building was pictured across the top of the New York Times Arts section yesterday, accompanied by an article announcing the unveiling of French architect Jean Nouvel's new design for the National Museum of Qatar.  I knew without reading beyond the title what had inspired him, not because of any special artistic insight, but because I'm a geologist by training.  The building evokes the form of desert gypsum crystals, better known as sand roses or desert roses, which typically are a beige-pinkish color, the same color of the concrete the architects are planning to use.

(photos from Jean Nouvel ateliers)

From the NYTimes:  "Inspired by sand roses, the tiny formations that crystallize just below the desert’s surface, the building’s dozens of disclike forms, intersecting at odd angles and piling up unevenly atop one another, celebrate a delicate beauty in the desert landscape that is invisible to those who have not spent time there. The lightness with which these forms rest on the land, meanwhile, conjures the ethereality of desert life."  They go on to call this the "French architect’s most overtly poetic act of cultural synthesis yet."

I couldn't agree more, it is poetic.  What the NYTimes didn't show was a picture of gypsum crystals, which I think would have given readers a much better sense of how truly evocative this design is.  Here, for your viewing pleasure, are some I downloaded from the web.....