Kim and I walked separately today…I was up earlier and therefore, ready earlier. So, we walked our own walks, keeping our own pace. Using the stopwatch function on my phone, I timed myself and while I didn’t beat Shamrock’s time, I did manage to beat yesterday’s pace by less than 25 seconds at 55:54. I know I slowed my pace a time or two so there is room for improvement…not by any great margin but I could improve all the same. Kim’s time was 50 minutes. He used a countdown method…set a timer for 1 hour to see how much time was left at the end of his walk.
Leaving my camera behind was a very
difficult thing to do, but I gently told my inner shutterbug not to fret, that
she’d get her chance later today. Listened to an audio book instead of music
because I thought I’d be able to keep a steadier pace…that proved to be true
for the most part. I had my first slow down, which had nothing to do with the
book, right around the tractor tire. Turned
to do a traffic check behind me and when I turned back around, there was a
javelina trotting down the other side of the road, like it owned the world. A
javelina!! I stopped and reached for my camera BUT I had to
settle for watching it leisurely turn toward the field and disappear into the
weeds. Agh!!
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We’ve only seen cardinals on the seed
feeder; however, the doves have been reaping the benefits of the cardinals messy
eating habits. They’ve been wandering into the yard and cleaning up the ground.
And this morning I saw doves bouncing around the tree, edging closer to the
feeder like they’re really wanting to get right to the source of the goodness
but something’s holding them back. I hope they work up the courage soon because
the feeder will be gone at the end of March. Grackles have also been hanging around but
haven’t found the feeder that I’ve seen.
Roadrunners have been seen in camp; in fact,
I scared one from our yard bushes the other day when I went to get on my bike.
Seems like an excellent target for the third cell cam. Put a plate with tiny pieces of ground beef
between the fence and the bushes and positioned the camera at the edge of our
yard. Now we sit back and wait to see
what comes. I checked to see what grackles eat and it isn’t outside the realm
of possibility that we’ll catch a grackle instead of a roadrunner. Hopefully,
there’s not enough meat there to draw anything that walks on 4 feet such as a
skunk, coyote, or dog.
I don’t see how we’d ever know for sure but I
wonder how birds know there’s any kind of food around. Is that what the tweets and chirps are about?
Or do they smell it? And as I write this, I realize I have a world of knowledge
at my fingertips so I’ll ask Google. Started reading an article that got into
more information about birds’ olfactory senses than I was looking for so I
started skimming through it. This is my
paraphrase of that article:
In
the 1820s, John James Audubon set out to prove that turkey vultures hunt by way
of superior sight not by smell. Based on a rudimentary experiment of dressing
up a fresh carcass and watching a vulture swoop down upon it and hiding a
rotting carcass which the vultures didn’t find, he announced that it was “fully
conclusive” that turkey vultures do not ‘scavenge’ by smell; they use eyesight.
That was the end of the story about a bird’s ability to detect smell for a lot
of years.
In
1960, Kenneth Stager proved that turkey vultures prefer fresher carcasses than
the rotting ones that Audubon used due to the production of the gas ethyl
mercaptan by decomposing carcasses.
That’s the same gas that’s added to natural gas so humans can detect a
leak. He had essentially debunked
Audubon’s theory but no one in the birding world noticed.
Next
to take up the cause was Bernice Wentzel who did experiments on different
species of birds. The birding world didn’t take her seriously either, but she
kept at it for over 25 years. Before she retired in 1989, she gave a talk at a
symposium in Norway. Gabrielle Nevitt,
who was already doing a dissertation on salmon olfactory, was in attendance and
she was hooked by the notion that birds could smell.
Soon
after, Nevitt was doing her own studies into proving that birds did indeed have
the ability to smell. She’s been at it since 1991, either alone or with others
who were running investigations that dovetailed with hers. But for the most
part, the birding world still wants to stand behind Audubon’s theory and
rebuffs her conclusions, saying she’s wasting her time. She is also delving
into how the loss of certain birds due to global warming could influence krill
and phytoplankton production which in turn affects overall ocean health. Recently
Nevitt teamed up with the CIA to investigate whether birds can smell volatiles
associated with plastic explosives.
The article concluded with these two
sentences: “It’s a weird world,” she says. But
it’s clear that Nevitt wasn't wasting her time after all.
Due to the amount of research Nevitt has
done as opposed to what Audubon did, I’m leaning toward the ‘birds can smell’
camp…plus I really want to think the smell of the ground beef will lure in the
roadrunners. J
P.S.
We’re going the ground beef route because someone told us that’s what she does,
and the roadrunners are frequent visitors.
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The audio book I was listening to on my walk
was ‘Courageous Faith’ by Debbye Turner Bell. It chronicles her journey of
faith and at one point she shared that in her youth when she’d get caught in a
wrongdoing and then tried pleading her way out of it, her mother’s response
would be: “I can’t hear what yer sayin’ because what yer doin’ is talkin’
too loudly.” That phrase hit me with
its simplicity and power. Applicable in so many areas of life.
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Last night when we were outside, Kim yelped
about something poking him in the foot. Couldn’t find anything in his shoe or
sock, though, so it was forgotten. A
couple of times throughout today he felt the same pain so tonight he got
serious about getting to the cause of it.
Checked his shoe…nothing there.
This time he took the insole out and lo, and behold, there was a thorn
poking up into his shoe and then into and through the insole. He had to use pliers to pull it out. It was longer
than a nickel, maybe about ¾” long and sturdy, not some little lightweight
thing. When I expressed surprise that he walked 3 miles this morning and didn’t
feel it, he did admit that it bit him a couple of times. If that was me, I would have sat down and
investigated…but if he did that then he wouldn’t have made in 50 minutes, would
he?
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40 Days of Lent challenge: Pray for someone you don’t get along with and ask God to soften your heart toward them. This activity is not new to me…I admit I’ve been guilty of the us vs. them attitude that was talked about in yesterday’s sermon. When I find myself dismissing someone because we differ in our thoughts, opinions, or whatever I remind myself that they are also God’s children and therefore worthy in His sight. Prayer usually follows.
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