jacki long: Day 5062: Happy 4th! & Roadrunner vs Rattlesnake.

"Broken Bridge": photo, junk paper, digital collage.

Want music?

Click: Maroon 5, Lovely Day.

2GN2S

Happy 4th!

My cousin Sheryl sent me photos of Lebanon, Indiana's wonderful community quilt made back in 1976, where it now hangs again in the Boone County courthouse this week.

Sheryl found our family’s squares and knew I would like to see them. Aunt Pauline and Uncle Owen had one, Cousins Donna, Bob, Sheryl and Scott had one, Aunt Martha’s was directly under theirs and she found Aunt Vonda‘s as well. Wonderful to enlarge them and study the stitches that they took the time to make.

Qwen, Pauline, Donna. Bob, Nancy, Jack, Martha, John, Sheryl, Scott, Paula,
Denise, Janice (Brian not born yet)

Donna, Bob, Sheyl, Scott, Lebanon, Indiana & Martha Beaty Adams w/art palette

Aunt Vonda Mae Kouns w/ plane for husband Kenneth MIA WW2

Sheryl also mentioned that Uncle Owen and Aunt Pauline got married today in 1928, so today is their 98th wedding anniversary. I am picturing a festive heavenly party?

The greater roadrunner kills rattlesnakes

Texas Parks and Wildlife describes the full sequence. The bird circles the snake at speed, leaping into the air to stay clear of the fangs, then darts in and drives its pointed beak into the snake's skull.

Repeated blows stun it. Once the snake is dazed, the roadrunner seizes it and beats it against the ground or a rock until the spine and skull are crushed. When two roadrunners hunt together, one distracts the snake from the front while the other pins its head from behind. They do this to rattlesnakes. A bird that weighs about a pound, killing a venomous snake with its face, on foot, in the open desert.

The roadrunner is not a raptor. It is a cuckoo. Its scientific name, Geococcyx, means ground cuckoo, from the Greek for earth and cuckoo. Unlike every other cuckoo on the continent, which lives in trees, the roadrunner lives almost entirely on the ground. It can fly, technically, but only for short bursts and only when it has to. Its wings are short and rounded and built for gliding off a ledge, not sustained flight. It runs instead, up to about 20 miles per hour, which makes it one of the fastest running birds in North America but, despite what the cartoon suggests, nowhere near fast enough to outrun an actual coyote.
It eats everything it can fit in its beak. Insects, scorpions, lizards, mice, other birds, fruit, and snakes, venomous or otherwise. It disables scorpions by biting off the stinger first. It gets almost all of its water from the animals it eats and almost never needs to drink. Excess salt is excreted through specialized nasal glands, which means the bird can live in deep desert with no standing water at all.
The desert tries to kill it at night. Temperatures in the Mojave and Chihuahuan deserts can drop forty or fifty degrees after sundown. The roadrunner handles this by entering torpor. It drops its body temperature from about 104 degrees Fahrenheit to 93, cutting its energy expenditure by more than thirty percent. In the morning it climbs onto a fencepost or a rock, turns its back to the sun, drops its wings, and raises the feathers along its spine to expose a patch of dark skin between its shoulders. The dark skin absorbs solar radiation directly into the bird's body. It can sit like this for two or three hours, essentially solar-charging itself back to operating temperature before it starts hunting. The behavior was first described in a 1971 paper in Science by Ohmart and Lasiewski, who called it energy conservation by hypothermia and absorption of sunlight.
Its feet have two toes pointing forward and two pointing back, an arrangement called zygodactyl, which leaves a track shaped like an X. You cannot tell from the print which direction the bird was going. The Hopi and other Pueblo peoples considered the roadrunner a medicine bird that could ward off evil spirits, and the X-shaped tracks were regarded as sacred symbols because they concealed the bird's direction of travel. Stylized roadrunner tracks have been found carved into rock by the Mogollon cultures of the prehistoric Southwest. Roadrunner feathers were placed on Pueblo cradleboards for spiritual protection.

Source: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department / Cornell Lab of Ornithology / Ohmart and Lasiewski (1971), Science / Birds of the World.