The Joys of Birding

Hardly a day goes by without me birding, either by watching avian visitors at our feeders in the yard, or by setting out with binoculars and camera in tow. Non-birders can’t imagine why anybody might spend hours looking for and rejoicing over feathered beings. I sometimes wonder, too, why I don’t get bored spending vast … Continue reading The Joys of Birding

Gone to the Ducks

Birders regularly recall the trigger bird that stopped them in their tracks and awakened their curiosity about the avifauna. While I can’t name one particular trigger species, I owe my fascination for feathered friends to the manifold ducks that migrate to Alaska during the summer. When my husband and I called this northernmost state home … Continue reading Gone to the Ducks

The Year in Pictures/Das Jahr in Bildern

 As I did for my 2016 review, I am again reminding myself of the motto expressed on a historic clock in downtown Colorado Springs: Dum Vivimus Vivamus. While we live, let us live.      The greater my disenchantment with political, religious, and familial strife, the more I seek refuge in nature, camera in tow. Next … Continue reading The Year in Pictures/Das Jahr in Bildern

Amache

Seventy-six years ago today, on December 7, 1941, Japan bombarded the American naval fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In reply, the United States, heretofore officially resolved to stay out of WWII, declared war on Japan and its ally Germany, a momentous step which would later change the course of this cataclysmic global affair. More … Continue reading Amache

Traces of New Spain

It is a truth universally acknowledged that to the victor go the spoils. In the wake of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America in 1492 for the King and Queen of Spain, the colonial realm “New Spain” supplanted the Aztec Empire. It comprised much of the land mass north of the Isthmus of Panama and included … Continue reading Traces of New Spain