Thursday, February 12, 2009

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:


6 comments:

Snowbabies said...

Lovely videos, the picture quality is great :-)

It's something I've never done before but will be trying at some point with the new camera, I'll need to do some research first though on how to get a huge video file compressed and online.

Paul.

Kim said...

Hmmmmm. For some reason my computer won't let me access the videos???? I love the fact that you name both your GPS and squirrel. I do the same with both of mine too.

Love the rainbow photo.

Kelly said...

...last night it was working, but this morning the squirrel video was gone. I separated them into two blog entries. Maybe that will help. I'm using Vimeo's Free level, maybe they make it so you really have to join and pay... Maybe I should just use YouTube... I don't really know much about them. I'll keep experimenting with the video. Hopefully it works now...

nina at Nature Remains. said...

I love CNC, too.
Their library is wonderful.
A couple of weeks ago, I went, planning to walk.
The weather was a bit cold, so I stayed inside, browsing books for a while--never did get out on the trails!!

Roy said...

Hmmm... Your wind made it here yesterday, but it really didn't get all that rough. We had our bad wind Sunday, and that one did take things down, including almost me. I was out walking when the squall line traveling in front of the system hit, and it darn near blew me off the Green Bridge into Gooseneck Cove. It also tried to blow my hat out to sea.

Heh, heh! And I see the Chickadee spotted you and started scolding.

Kelly said...

Nina...I love it there. I wish I lived closer to it!
Roy...that would have been a sight to see!