Celebrating Bees Today

 

This Spring we have been blessed with up-close sightings of eagles and otters, snapping turtles and hummingbirds. The glory of Creation has lifted my spirit in these oft-times dismal days.

One of my happiest moments was seeing the first bumble bee, a regular visitor to the flowers of my childhood home but now threatened in North America  by loss of habitat and pesticides. We've seen other bee species as well, thanks be to the Creator. 

My big struggle this year has been allowing the dandelions to grow rather than vanquishing them. They are important flowers (not weeds) for bees and other pollinators. One researcher rather delightfully described their nectar as Red Bull for bees. Bees are essential for pollinating many crops which would collapse without them. 

There are about half a dozen references to bees in the bible but ten times that number of references to honey, which requires a whole of bees to produce. The Promised Land for the people of Israel was filled with milk and honey, you might recall. 

This is World Bee Day, so we can all pay attention to the bees in our neighbourhoods, regard them as friends rather than enemies, and ensure that we do what needs to happen  for them to thrive in the Promised Land of wherever we live. 

 

For the Love of Turtles

                                                      Blanding's Turtle -- Frink Centre Marsh

Today Ruth and I strolled the boardwalk at the Frink Centre Conservation area north of Belleville. We stopped at one point to look at a photo display of various creatures in this particular marsh, including the Blanding's turtle. This species is threatened, an unhappy status which applies to other species in Ontario. We Groundlings are adept at destroying turtle habitat and the current government has no regard for wetlands, sad to say. 

I thought to myself that I'd never seen a Blanding's there or anywhere for that matter. We walked on perhaps fifty metres and there was a Blanding's turtle. It kindly stuck around long enough for me to do a photo shoot before we continued on. 

Some of you know of my "I brake for turtles" outlook, and I have been known to pull over to the side of the road and engage in a turtle intervention, even stopping traffic. And of course I have great respect for the First Nations term "Turtle Island" to describe the Earth. I even have an area at the top of our stairs where I have a bit of an altar, not to worship turtles but to recognize the Creator. 

So, I thank God for the elusive and beleaguered Blanding's. He or she made my day!

More Praise for the Birds of Spring

 

                                                   St, Francis Stained Glass Window -- Taize, France

Birds are singing, woods are ringing, with thy praises, blessed King:

Lake and mountain, field and fountain, to they throne their tributes bring.

Yesterday was International Dawn Chorus Day which has been acknowledged since the 1980's and I'm glad it exists, particularly during this pandemic.I offered some thoughts on this celebration in my Lion Lamb blog and I've decided that Groundling is a good place as well. 

Many congregations have been forced to find alternatives to gathering for Sunday worship, over the course of the past 14 months. When the first shut-down occurred in March of 2020 we assumed that closing our doors would be temporary. Some haven't held a single worship service in their sanctuary since. Even when some congregations, such as ours in Trenton, did return to in-person worship one of the significant differences was the absence of the choir. This is the reality in most churches because there just isn't the technological capability to make it happen virtually and protocols prohibit the proximity necessary for choral singing, not to mention that congregational singing has been banned. 

.In recent days we've been enjoying this "dawn chorus" as an alternative, including during Sunday morning rambles. Springtime at dawn including an astonishing variety of birdsong, and frog-song as well, if you live in the right spot. This chorus borders on a cacophony at times, but so do some human choirs. .I was in the woods and by the water north of Belleville just after 7:30 yesterday and the birds were everywhere. We haven't reached the height of the warbler migration yet, but there were still lots of vocal avian choristers, with some woodpeckers adding percussion. 

I was peering through the gloom of a rainy morning today when I realized that there was a rose-breasted grosbeak at one of the feeders. It brightened our day despite the weather, and I'll be listening for the song of a pair now. 

                                               Rose-breasted Grosbeaks (not my photo)

For the longest time the scientific thinking has been that birds vocalize to announce territory and to attract mates. There is more discussion now that birds may sing for the pleasure and praise of it, and that works for me. The psalmist would agreed: "By the streamse the birds of the air have their habitation ,they sing among the branches.Psalm 104:12

Thank God for these choirs in a time when we need the songs of hope. 

Eric Ravilious Wood engraving 1930's