It was a dark and windy night…

Today I drove over to the Cincinnati Nature Center, but when I turned left onto Tealtown Road, a huge ROAD CLOSED sign was blocking the way. During the very windy night, tree branches and electric wires had come down and were blocking the road. Luckily, I had Jill the GPS Girl in my car and pulled her out and plugged her in. She took me down Binnens to Baldwin to Tealtown, and I was able to squeak in from the other direction. Binnens and Baldwin are one-lane roads and go through some very beautiful countryside. It was the first time I had been on those roads, and I was happy for the detour. When I finally arrived at the nature center, it was practically empty, and the visitor’s center was close. I had chosen the nature center for today’s adventure because I wanted to use their research library to follow up on a previous post (Ice Shots…) and find out a bit more about why birds don’t freeze. So many of my friends had asked me, and I knew the basics, fluffing feathers to trap body heat, torpor (lowering body temp to conserve energy), the physical structure of the feet and legs (scales, no sweat glands), and the complex network of blood vessels in the feet of ducks and water birds that act as a heat exchanger, but I wanted to find more technical and detailed information.

Instead, I took a test video of a cute chickadee foraging on the ground:

Chickadee at Cincinnati Nature Center from Kelly Riccetti on Vimeo.

Usually the rainbow appears after a storm, but last night, the rainbow appeared before the winds and storm arrived. It was incredibly bright and Spot-man, of course, noticed it first and yelled for Matty and me to look out the window to check out the intense color: