I am so pleased I was able to get a few more good shots of the hummingbirds that we have :) If you have never heard what one sounds like when it is flying you have to listen to it here! Some days they fly very close to us and they can be quite aggressive over territory and food so you will be sitting outside eating lunch and there will be 2 hummingbirds dive bombing each other and just a chattering at each other on high speed around your head! *grin* Listen to this link to hear them chattering :)
Did you know that a Hummingbird is capable of flying at speeds up to 100 km/hr? Amazing isn't it!
When flying they can beat their wings up to 80 times per second and that is why when you watch them their wings appear to be invisible or only partially there. They also have a very high body temperature and heart rate. Their teeny tiny hearts can beat up to 1200 times per minute! All of that flying and flapping takes a lot of food and energy so they can eat as much as 2/3 of their body weight each day. The main staple of their diet is sugar which comes from flower nectar and tree sap but they also need protein to keep and help build their muscles so they also eat insects and pollen.
Did you know that a Hummingbird has a really great memory? Well they do and can remember where there are good food sources from even a couple of years ago! So it's a good idea to keep your feeder in the same spot each year and they will be sure to return there first while they wait for all of the flowers in your garden to bloom :)
We were in Hummingbird heaven today :) There were tons of them in the flower garden this afternoon! I believe that both of the Hummingbirds in the these photos are a Selasphorus rufus or Rufous Hummingbird. I love the above photo because the background is so blurred that it looks like the wings have beat so fast the background smeared *grin*
The above hummer's wings are beating so fast that aren't even visible in the picture!! Look at its beautiful green back. It's catching the sunlight and you can even see a tinge of purple showing up as well.
This week Unplug Your Kids' weekly Unplugged Project is Stone. I was a little stumped at first *grin* What in the world could I come up with that would use a stone!? Luckily I had an aha moment and thought of 'stepping' stones :)
What we used
One 18kg bag of Ready Mix Cement
3 Cardboard boxes
Assortment of colored ceramic dishes
1 large garbage bag
Scissors
Tape
Hammer
Rubber Gloves
We started by getting our boxes ready since they were going to be the forms for our stepping stones. Bulk cereal boxes (cut off the lower portion about 3 inches from the bottom) work well for this or yogurt flats, basically any box that has good sturdy sides to hold up to the weight of the cement. Next take your garbage bag, cut it open and fit it inside of your box to create a liner.
Using your tape secure all of the sides so that the plastic won't slip down later when you add your cement to the box.
Here are our 3 boxes all lined and ready for our cement :)
Now came the fun part! Smashing up all of the bowls and mugs to create a colorful array of chunks for our mosaic designs we were going to be creating :) We picked up all of our dishes at a garage sale for less than $5. The kids absolutely loved this part. *Warning* Make sure that the children and yourself are wearing sunglasses or some other form of eye protection, little bits of ceramic do fly up into the air when they are hit with the hammer so you want to make sure you don't get hurt.
After a good 10 minutes of smashing and crashing we had a rainbow of colors :)
Next we called in our master cement mixer aka Daddy *grin*. Using a large 5 gallon bucket he poured in the Ready Mix cement, added the appropriate amount of water per the bag instructions and mixed it thoroughly. The beauty of the Ready Mix cement is that you don't need to add sand or fine gravel to the mix like you do with regular cement!
With our cement ready it was time to fill our forms with it...
and K put on some rubber gloves so that he could press the cement down into the boxes really well so that it filled the corners evenly and smoothed the top.
Now you just let your creativity flow or as my 4 yr. old daughter did just plunk them in by how pretty the colors are *grin*
Here's her finished stone, multi colored and very eye catching!
My son found a neat lid that had 3 Spaniards on it which he thought looked like pirates. He loves pirates so they formed the centerpiece of his stone :)
And here's mine. As I look at it next to theirs I think I'm lacking severely in the color department!! But I was having fun using the top of a creamer as the circle for my flower and I managed to get the handle of a tea cup in one piece for one of the leaves and little rosettes off another piece as my accent pieces *grin* I was trying to make a picture with mine :)
They're still in the garage drying since we made them this evening and we are going to give them to Omi for her garden since she loves making stepping stones. They can't wait to add theirs to her collection :) Hope you have fun making some of your own!
I thought that I would share with your our favorite Caterpillar & Butterfly study books that we used while raising our caterpillar larvae :)
Raising Minibeasts ~ Caterpillars by Barrie Watts is a great one to start with. The information is nice and simple so your youngest children can enjoy it, covers everything and even includes a really easy project on how to build your own screen house for raising your caterpillars inside.
The Life Cycle of a Butterfly by Bobbie Kalman is more than just about the butterfly life cycles! There are really neat sidebars with fun information, how to identify male & female butterflies, migration info, what to plant in your own butterfly garden and how to pamper visiting butterflies :)
The Life of a Butterfly by Clare Hibbert is another great book with great photos, Q&A throughout to quiz your children as you go along to see what they remember and really neat info on how parasites feed off of caterpillars!
National Geographic's Face to Face With Caterpillars by Darlyne A. Murawski has absolutely stunning photos!! This one is great for your older child as it goes into a little more depth than the others by going into detail about their anatomy and more and it covers caterpillars from around the globe. If anything you have to see this book just for the pictures *grin*. Some of them are really bizarre looking!
And last but not least, what would a butterfly study be without Ms. Frizzle and the Magic Schoolbus!? Butterfly Battle has the class turned into butterflies as they struggle to survive. The short novel is peppered with tons of great information like how to tell a moth and a butterfly apart, how the scales on a butterflies wings help give it its unique color and much more :)
In my last entry I shared with you all about the growth of our caterpillars and their final molt as they shed their skin for the last time and formed their pupa's. Well now they are just about ready to emerge!
Do you know how to tell when your caterpillar turned butterfly is ready to break out of its pupa? The pupa will turn clear and you will actually be able to see the newly formed butterfly inside the pupa! Look really closely at the photo above. Can you see some of the colors on it's wings?
It's hard to believe that just 10 days ago this pupa was completely black and there was no way to see inside of it.
Our caterpillar has made a complete metamorphosis or change and has now emerged as a beautiful Painted Lady :) After 3 or 4 pushes it has freed itself from its pupa. When a butterfly first emerges its wings are really wet and sort of crumpled, and it cannot fly. It dangles from its pupa and for the next couple of hours it will slowly flap its wings open and closed.
Do you know why it spends so much time flapping its wings? When a butterfly emerges its body is full of a lot of liquid and the pumping action gets that liquid moving into the veins of its crumpled wings. Each time it opens and closes its wings more of the liquid fills the veins and makes them stronger and bigger! Soon this butterfly will be ready to fly.
Here's a close up shot of the pupa that one of our butterflies came out of. It's still intact.
Our butterfly has finished drying, its wings are stronger now and it has actually started to become more colorful as well. They know instinctively how to fly, no one has to teach them how to do it. It's ready to find something sweet to drink :)
Did you see the proboscis on the butterfly (3 photos above) that just emerged from its pupa? You can see it curled up coming out of the butterflies head. The proboscis is the butterflies mouth that acts like a drinking straw. It will use it to suck up water and sweet nectar from flowers. Butterflies actually smell nectar with their antennae!
We have released our butterflies into nature :) They are now off to lay new eggs to start the life cycle all over again. We are definitely looking forward to raising more next year!
With all of the excitement over our baby Robins I completely forgot to update you on how our butterfly larvae was doing! So I'm going to recap what happened since we have raised and set them free already :) Calling them hungry is an understatement, try starving! All day long they munched and crunched, so loud in fact that they could be heard clear across the other side of the room. On top of their little food container they came in was a piece of breathable woven mesh type fabric separating them from the lid and one of the little rascals or maybe it was more than one actually chewed holes through the material resulting in one escapee.
Do you know how a caterpillar chews? By opening and closing its jaws just like a pair of scissors!
As our caterpillars ate and grew their skin did not grow with them and grew tight. To tight in fact that they had to 'molt' or shed their skin and a new skin would form. And each time our caterpillars molted they grew twice their size and then they would molt again! Do you know what a caterpillar does with the skin that it sheds? It eats it! It is full of good nutrients that help the caterpillar grow. The stage in between molts is called an 'instar' and during this time they continue to eat like crazy. On average a caterpillar goes through 4 different stages of molting.
The above photo is just about 10 days after they arrived at our home. They had just began to get ready for their last and final molt. When a caterpillar is ready to form it's 'pupa' or 'chrysalis' it finds a nice place to hang upside down, and from out of it's spinneret it shoots sticky silk (just like a spider) creating a little button from which it sticks its abdomen to. Once they were all ready, having glued themselves to the top of their little home they began their last molt by splitting open their skin and from underneath their 'pupa' formed.
Their skin splits right in half from top to bottom and the 'pupa' appears and becomes a hard protective shell for the caterpillar to change into a butterfly. The caterpillar actually turns into a liquid inside of the 'pupa' as it's body re-organizes itself into the butterfly that it will emerge as. They are very strange looking to. Look ours has spikes on it!
Did you know that caterpillars don't see very well? They can only see light and shadows through their clusters of eyes. Another interesting bit of info about caterpillars is that once they have formed their pupa sometimes you can see movement from inside of it! This happens if they get bumped or moved. They can actually startle and means that they are in tune with what is happening around them. Isn't that neat!
Make sure you check back for the last update on our caterpillars when the emerge from their pupas as butterflies.
We have an overabundance of delicious rhubarb that's just begging to be used. So we've had rhubarb pie, rhubarb fool and now rhubarb jam with the added sweetness of strawberries :) I thought that I would share my Strawberry Rhubarb Jam recipe that I use without any added artificial pectin.
Ingredients
4 cups diced rhubarb
6 cups of hulled strawberries cut in half only
2 green apples quartered and seeds removed
6 cups of sugar
1/2 cup of apple juice/water*
Wash the rhubarb and then using your food processor and the slicing plate, run all of the rhubarb through it. I find that this is the quickest and easiest way to prepare the rhubarb for jam and I personally don't like really big chunks of it in my jam anyways. Once you have 4 cups cut place it in a large, heavy bottomed saucepan.
Now for the natural pectin. Instead of using Certo or one of the other box pectins you can find at the supermarket I like to use apples to thicken my jam and it always does a great job :) All fruits have a natural pectin in them, some more than others but apples have the strongest amount of the natural thickener. You want to use green apples or tart not quite ripe apples and cut them in quarters removing the seeds only, but not the peel. Place them in a saucepan with just enough water to cover the bottom of the pot and simmer them until they are tender when poked with a fork. Once they are cooked, pour the juice and the apples into a fine mesh strainer over top of a measuring cup. *You are going to use the water from the pot and as much liquid as you can squeeze from the cooked apples as your 1/2 cup liquid needed for the recipe. Don't worry if a bit of apple puree falls into your measuring cup as you collect the juice, it won't hurt the recipe at all :) I didn't quite get 1/2 a cup when I made mine so I just topped it up with a little bit of water. Take your liquid in your measuring cup and pour it into your big pot of sliced rhubarb and place it on the stove.
You can start to simmer your rhubarb with the lid on while you get your strawberries hulled and halved.
Now that you have everything ready add your strawberries to your rhubarb and liquid and bring to a boil. Once it is boiling pour in your sugar and continue cooking it at a full rolling boil stirring constantly for 15 minutes. An easy way to tell if your jam is going to be the desired consistency you want is to do the spoon test. Place a plate in your freezer so it chills and then when you are ready to test the thickness of your jam, dip a spoon in it, place it on the plate in the freezer for about a minute so that it can cool quickly and then take the spoon out and turn it on its side. Does it slide off quickly and is runny still? or is it nice and thick and moves just a little? If it's the latter then your jam is ready to be placed in your hot sterile jars. Now pour your jam into your jars and seal :)
I like to keep my jars nice and toasty in the oven at 200*F while I work so that they are ready when I am :) I put in a deep baking sheet and then cover it with a layer of boiling water out of the kettle, then I pour some of the boiling water into my jars and then place them in the water on the cookie sheet. I also keep a kettle of boiling water ready towards the end of cooking my jam to pour into the pot with my sealers as well so that it only takes me a minute to get them up to the 180 degree temperature needed for them to seal properly. Boy do I miss the good old days when you could put the sealers in the pot and just let them boil without any worries. Now it says not to bring them to a boil or they may not work properly :( Another little trick I use for getting the jam into my jars without a lot of mess is by pouring it into a large 2 liter measuring cup so that I can pour it into the jars without all the drips and spills of ladling it in from the
pot :) Yields 11 cups.
I love to hear the popping sound that the sealers make as they suck down. I always wait anxiously listening for it. It signifies a job well done *grin* I found some pretty gingham and natural raffia to use as toppers for my jam jars and now they are ready to be given as gifts. That is if we don't eat it all first *grin*
This week Unplug Your Kids' weekly Unplugged Project is Gardens. Not specifically gardening but some sort of aspect about a garden so I thought that I would share a fantastic public children's garden that we visited last month. It was completely visible that it was all about making gardening fun for little hands! To start with all of the beds were surrounded with funky colored stones. Hmmm, remember that previous unplugged project we did about painted rocks? Well this would definitely be a fantastic way to make use of the buckets full of funky frogs, ladybugs and other rock creatures we have piling up in our craft corner :)
Another fun garden craft they incorporated was using old rubber boots potted with flowers as row markers. There were tons of mismatched rubber boots at the end of each row and they were embellished with more funky paintings! I'm sure that we have a couple of old pairs of holey boots kicking around in the shoe cupboard that we're going to have to dig out and plant flowers in *grin*
Don't have any old boots at home to try this with? How about looking at the thrift stores. You should be able to find a slew of multi colored boots there and most of the time they only cost a buck or two :)
Under an arbor we found a neat poster of the life of a radish under glass and there was another one on the life of a sunflower to. Wouldn't you just love to have growth charts of flowers and vegetables tucked away in your garden for your children to study and compare the stages with what you are growing in your garden? I know books do the same thing but there's something extra special about them :)
In another corner of the garden they had a GIANT teepee set up for growing beans on. It must have been at least 8 feet tall, made out of old tree limbs and driftwood sticks all wrapped with twine so that the bean runners will have something to climb to create a solid wall and they had left an opening on one side so that later on the children will be able to go inside of it :) We've done this on a much smaller scale so this is on my mental list for next years garden plans!
And lastly they had an absolutely fabulous way to make paths between the rows in the garden..... PINECONES!! Now I would have never thought of collecting pinecones to use as mulch between our vegetable rows. My kids just love collecting pinecones and we have lots of them around here so you can guess what we'll be doing this fall *grin* I wouldn't think that they would break down really quickly either so they should last and last. Hope you enjoyed our trip to the children's garden :)
With summertime officially started as of June 20th and the call of the beach beckoning for you to come and play how can you say no!? I can't, and I've never heard any protest from the children either *grin* With every beach visit (unless it is clearly posted not to remove any shells, wildlife etc. from that beach) we come home with a slew of shells, rocks, colorful kelp pieces, the occasional crab and and bunch of odds and sods :) We've even been known to coil up those HUGE bull kelp and stuff them in the car to make kelp dolls with later. LOL. But what do you do with all of those shells?? They really do tend to pile up by the end of the season! I've come up with a fantastic idea.... we're making music makers this year, sort of similar to morrocas but without handles :)
This is a great 'seek & find' game to play at the beach because you need to find completely intact clam shells that fit together nicely without to much of a gap around their edges when they close and you can use this as a little learning exercise with the little ones to because you can get them to sort them into piles of smooth and rough textured shells and big and little shells. Older children can even go further by grouping them by their different species by sight and then check how well they did with the help of a good seashell handbook. After you get home let the children raid the pantry and craft drawers for items to hide away inside your shells to create musical sounds. Above you can see what we found for ours. Personally I love the sound that the large jingle bells made the best :)
Be gentle when you open your clam shells because as they dry their hinges tend to become a little brittle, so don't force them open to wide or you'll end up with a broken shell. Don't worry though they can take some pressure :)
My 4 year old picked all of the smallest items to fill her shells with so that she cold transfer everything from the bowls piece by piece.
It takes quite a while to fill a large clam shell one grain of rice at a time *grin*.
After we got our shells all filled I pulled out my trusty LePage speed set epoxy. Use a thick piece of cardboard or some heavy tinfoil to mix your epoxy on. Craft popsicle sticks work fantastic for mixing and applying your glue with to.
Spread a layer of your glue along the open edge of your clam shell and then hold firmly shut until it starts to firm up. This only takes a minute or so and is completely hard in about 5 minutes.
We had a few shells that had some larger gaps on the sides that needed filling so that we didn't lose our fillings :) The easiest way to do this is to wait until your epoxy is starting to set on your work surface. It will get really thick and stretchy and now you can use it like gum and stretch it over top of the large openings without worrying about it running inside of the shell and gluing your music making items to.
And that's it! They can shake until their hearts content :) We made a little video of what ours sounded like. You may need to turn off the bird sounds on my left hand sidebar so you can hear them better. Have fun making some of your own!
I think we're suffering from empty nest syndrome *grin* We're missing the baby Robins terribly! Robins will nest twice in a season sometimes using the same nest for both batches so we're crossing our fingers that Mama will return. Above was all that was left of the nest after the last fledgling had left but Mama Robin has returned because the dropping that was there has been covered with a some new straw. Perhaps a promising sign of her coming return? If not, we have been so fortunate to have been able to observe it once and will always remember it even if we never get the chance to follow along so closely again :)
I finally have confirmation that our last two baby Robins are safe and sound!! I was standing in the kitchen doing some dishes and from the other side of the room I could hear the last baby Robin just a peeping away in its nest so I thought I'd have a peek and see what was up. Well the photo above is exactly what I found. Our last baby was getting ready to leave its cozy little nest and jump into the world around it :) There it stood with the wind blowing it's little fuzzy tufts of baby fuzz and swinging with the plant hanger.
Of course I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to catch it's first flight on camera so off I raced to grab the digital camera and quickly put it into movie mode :) I made it back just in time to catch it's very first flight as a fledgling. You can view it above. It's not very long but you can see it take off from the plant hanger before I go racing out the door to find out where it was going *grin* Boy, I just can't mind my own business can I! Actually just before the movie ends you can hear me exclaim 'there it is'. I spotted Mama Robin down at the end of the grass calling to it. Baby flew the whole distance before setting down.
Here it is sitting under the brush by the side of the driveway and Mama was tweeting away to it a little further on, encouraging it to keep moving along.
There it goes.....
It is so cute :) Here it is taking another rest before Mama Robin leads it into the chicken yard. That must be the grove of trees that Daddy Robin is in. We're going to have to do some exploring and see if we can spot them up on one of the branches.
Here's one final video of our Baby Robin before it disappears :) Mama Robin is calling to it and you can tell that she is communicating to it and making sure that it follows her :) So neat!
Last night before it was to dim to take any pictures I got one last shot of the two baby Robins in the nest with Mama....
And this morning there is only one left. Our second 'fledgling' has left the nest, and I think it was successful this time! There is no signs of it anywhere, so we're crossing our fingers that this one has made it safely to it's new perch. When the fledglings leave the nest and are successful at flying they don't return to the nest again. Instead they will join Daddy Robin on the tree branch he sleeps on :) Mama will continue to bring it some worms and it will remain there for roughly another 2 weeks before it is a 'good' flyer and then moves on by itself.
Do you know why baby Robins have speckled chests instead of bright red ones? To camouflage themselves in the brush and leaves below their nests. When the baby fledgling leaps from the nest and lands on the ground the color of it will give it some protection for hiding so that it won't be as easily spotted by predators. Their red breasts will grow in in a couple of weeks when the downy feathers are pushed out by adult feathers :)
This morning when we went to check on the baby Robins we only found two of them in the nest. Of course we immediately were excited because the third one was now a 'fledgling' we thought! Fledglings are baby Robins that are at the stage of jumping out of the nest and starting to practice flying :)
I went outside to see if I could catch a glimpse of it hopping around on the ground and snap a photo of him from a distance but I couldn't find it anywhere! At first I thought that it had really done well and must have already went to be with Daddy..... but then I found it. It was to late to save him. By the looks of his feathers on his wings I don't think that it was even ready to make the jump but maybe so, or perhaps when they were stretching and moving around in the nest it accidentally fell out? We're all saddened by the news and have buried him to detract any cats and such from coming to it and prowling around the nest area. I wonder what the survival rate of Robin fledglings is? I'll have to find out.
Video of Baby Beluga Being Born at Vancouver Aquarium
You have to see this!! It is super cool :)
Qila a 12 year old Beluga Whale at the Vancouver Aquarium just gave birth to her first calf (baby beluga), a girl, on Tuesday June 10th, at 4:28 pm. The video actually shows the birth and you can see the baby start to swim and take a breath even before going underwater again. Everything seems to be going well :)
(Click on the above image to take you to the download)
I just came across this fabulous guide to Nature Journaling following the guidelines of Charlotte Mason! It is 90 pages long and includes 36 weeks worth of journal pages to print out or you may just want to print out a couple of them to get you started and then find yourself creating your own unique journal pages :)
Sections included in the ebook are:
Introduction to Nature Study
Finding Delight in Nature Study
Charlotte Mason on Nature Study and “Nature-Diaries”
Better Nature Journaling
Dry Brush Technique for Nature Journals
Instructions for Nature Journal
and lists for charting flora & fauna you spot
I can't wait to incorporate some of the ideas into our nature journals :) Hurry though and download it, I'm not sure how long you will be able to get it as a freebie!
Our three little Robin babies are really filling out their little nest now and are big enough to keep themselves warm so Mama Robin is no longer sleeping in the nest at night unless it rains :) She really has to take a leap of faith to sleep else where while her babies are alone!
Look at those wide eyes, they are completely alert to their surroundings now :) Did you notice that their beaks are changing color and starting to lengthen a bit?
It's been 2 full days since I've taken a photo of the Robin babies and all of a sudden they have sprouted feathers!! Their growth spurt is going full speed ahead :) Today they were busy stretching and spreading their wings after feedings, soon they will be getting ready to make the leap out of the nest. They usually make the big jump when they are 12 - 14 days old, that means we only have a few more days left with them.
Did you know that each of the baby Robins will probably eat around 14 feet of worms in their two week stay in the nest?
I captured a little snippet of Mama Robin feeding her babies today!! I don't have my digital camera card right now so I only had the internal memory to work with so the video is very short *grin* but I looped it so you can see it twice. Still cool even if it's short :)
You can see what I was talking about in an earlier post about the babies being fed larger chunks of worms now. Mama had quite a mouthful when she arrived and then placed it on the side of the nest picking up chunks to be distributed amongst the babies.
Here's a final close up of the babies :)
Robin babies hatch in the same order that their eggs were laid which means that all of the babies were not born on the same day! Can you tell which one is the oldest in the above photo?
I just realized that the newest edition of Learning in the Great Outdoors is now up and running over at Miss Rumphius Effect's Blog and it is jam packed with awesome entries so head over there right now to check them out! You won't be disappointed, I promise :)
