Tag: plants

What to Do If You Find Wildlife That Needs Help

Posted on by jessicabingaman

After so very many phone calls and texts between me and folks who think they’ve found an injured hawk or owl, I decided to make a printable, shareable handout about wildlife in need. You might like to use this as a little unit study for school-aged kiddos too! It’s scattered with QR codes so that I can use it at educational talks and give it to finders to share with friends. For the purpose of easy clicking here on the blog, here are all the links included in the handout.

Nesting Season

Hummingbirds Are Kindergarten Teachers

California Council For Wildlife Rehabilitators

How To Capture & Transport An Injured Bird

Sky Falconry

Spring has sprung!

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My love for animals and flowers was certainly cultivated my Grandfather Lapp.  He also started me reading Julia Child but that’s another post altogether.  Today to celebrate the first day of my very favorite season, I’m posting a few of the beautiful blooms that he tended on his ranch in Auburn California.  The time and love invested is evident in their beauty.  I’m grateful that I took the time snap these photographs and that his spirit is always near when I recharge my mama batteries by enjoying nature.

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Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener seems to be only one of the instruments, not the composer.  ~Geoffrey B. Charlesworth

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The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven –
All’s right with the world!
~Robert Browning

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That God once loved a garden we learn in Holy writ.
And seeing gardens in the Spring I well can credit it.
~Winifred Mary LettsDSC_0112

The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun’s kiss glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze.
~Julian GrenfellDSC_0111

Spring has returned.  The Earth is like a child that knows poems.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Countdown to Spring: Day 3

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Last week I posted about my mom’s green thumb.  Today, with only a few winter days remaining, her blooms are reaching their slender necks for the sun and smiling!

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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.  ~Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

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With daffodils mad footnotes for the spring,
And asters purple asterisks for autumn –
~Conrad Aiken, Preludes for Memnon, 1930

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I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.  ~Ruth Stout

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God loved the flowers and invented soil.  Man loved the flowers and invented vases.  ~Variation of a saying by Jacques Deval (God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.)

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The front door to springtime is a photographer’s best friend. ~Terri Guillemets

Countdown to Spring: Days 4 and 5

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In honor of the amazing weekend weather and celebration of Saint Patrick’s day I’m posting one of my very favorite green blooms.  Though they are not four leafed clovers (which are also poking their heads up everywhere), I think Saint Patrick would have loved their heart shaped leaves!

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“When all thoughts
Are exhausted
I slip into the woods
And gather
A pile of shepherd’s purse.

Like the little stream
Making its way
Through the mossy crevices
I, too, quietly
Turn clear and transparent.”

~Ryokan

 

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Countdown to Spring: 6 Days

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Today’s photograph is of the flower I think my mom my loves best… Although, to a flower lover this may be sort of like saying you have a favorite child.  There is a green thumb gene somewhere is her Lapp family heritage that she and her sister have carried on from my Grandpa but just never really took hold of me.  I guess I photograph the blooms instead of plant them!Countdown 6

Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,
Who, armed with golden rod
And winged with the celestial azure, bearest
The message of some God.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Iris

Countdown to Spring: 7 Days

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Abundance!  With only one week to go until the official start of Spring, there are new little  blooms everywhere.  Today’s photographs are from a quick stop at my midwifery teacher’s home yesterday and taken with my iPhone.

Countdown 7 Daffodil 1

How can one help shivering with delight when one’s hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade and stiff with newborn vigor!  ~Colette

Countdown 7 Daffodil 2

Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity.  ~John Ruskin

Countdown 7 Lilac

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart, imagining itself alone and unwatched, feels most deeply in the night-time, so seems it as if the flowers, in musing modesty, await the mantling eventide ere they give themselves up wholly to feeling, and breathe forth their sweetest odours. Flow forth, ye perfumes of my heart, and seek beyond these mountains the dear one of my dreams! ~Heinrich Heine, “The Hartz Journey” (1824), Pictures of Travel, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, 1855

Countdown 7 poppy

Summer set lip to earth’s bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there.
~Francis Thompson, “The Poppy,” 1891

Can you find the tiny little spider friend in this photo???
Can you find the tiny little spider friend in this photo???

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair…  ~Susan Polis Shut

Countdown to Spring: 8 Days

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Countdown to Spring 8 days

I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.  ~Ruth Stout

Countdown to Spring: 12 Days

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Countdown day 12

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.  When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers. ~ Thich Nhat Hahn

Countdown to Spring: 13 Days

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Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words.  They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.  ~Lydia M. Child

Countdown to Spring 13/2

A profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.  ~The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams

Countdown to Spring: 14 Days

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Countdown to Spring Day 14

And Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast
rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Sensitive Plant”