Blast from the Past! Friday 01.08.10

Here we are one full week into 2010, a new year, a new decade, and, so far it’s living up to all my optimistic expectations. Helps that I didn’t make any resolutions, thus, no resolutions to have already broken by now…

I have, however, committed to a personal project 365, in which I will (try my best to) take a photo a day for the entire year. So far so good—though, full disclosure: New Year’s Day I did not take a photo, and thus the photo posted for that day was actually taken on January 2. I’ll make up for this by taking a photo on January 1, 2011, which will complete my 365 project. (I always have been one to do things my own way, for better or worse.) Anyway, if you’re at all interested in what I manage to find to photograph daily, you can check it out at www.elssipkes.com. There’s also a link in the menu bar at the top of this blog page called “365 project”, and you can access it from there as well.

Aiding in my search for subjects for my daily photo is the “Be a Tourist in Your Own Town” pass I received for Christmas, which allows me to visit 33 local attractions in the month of January. Yesterday, we visited the Center for Birds of Prey in Awendaw, SC. Lots of cool birds to see and learn about, but of course the highlight was watching the bird flight show.

Included in the photos here are a Common Hawk soaring over the trees, Center for Birds of Prey trainer Aubrey (or was it Audrey?) with a Ural Owl, another trainer holding what I believe was a Falcon, and, in the rest of the photos, a (non-native) Kite who eats insects as his main diet (they use bits of meat in the flight show.) Interestingly, he (she?) catches his food in his claws and then brings the food up to his beak. If you look closely you can see the food in the air, and then in his claws. Also, you’ll see that the birds all have radio transmitters attached to their tail feathers so they can be tracked and located in case they wander off during the show. In the one photo the Kite flew by and took food off the fingertip of the trainer. We could have watched him fly for hours, and I can highly recommend it to you locals to go out there and check it out for yourselves!

Speaking of wildlife, this week’s Blast from the Past photo shows me feeding ducks at a vacation rental in Holland at about age 7 (I’ve always been an avid connect-with-nature girl.) The other photo was taken when I was about 25 at my parent’s home in California—I think I’d just come home from the beach and saw the ducks in their backyard and asked my mom to take a photo of me feeding them, a sort of re-creation of the same scene from years before. I guess in another few years I’ll need to seek out another opportunity to re-create the scene again…

Hope you all had a great first week of the new year. Enjoy the weekend, and maybe go be a tourist in your own town! See you next week!