Bald and Golden Eagles

We went to a local forest ecology preserve to see a presentation on eagles this morning. The presentation was from Auburn University's Raptor Center. They did a presentation this summer at our local library and the boys loved it. It is great fun to see "War Eagle" in person after seeing him fly at the games. Today a friend took some wonderful photos.

This is Spirt and he is being trained to fly at the Auburn games in the fall. It is hard to tell in this photo but he was injured as a young bird and his beak is not curved like it should be. He would not survive in the wild so he was rehabilitated and is used in educational programs.



This is Nova (War Eagle #7). I can't tell you what a beautiful bird he is. We have seen him fly at the games and it is really incredible but even more so to see him upclose.



Here is the link for the Auburn Raptor Center. They have some awesome kids stuff on their website.

http://www.vetmed.auburn.edu/index.pl/for_kids

Cool project for boys

I was surfing the web today looking for ideas for homemade Christmas presents. I found this super cool bull whip (think Indiana Jones) made out of duct tape. I think the boys would love this so it may be a project for next week.

Here is the link to the blog.

http://skiptomylou.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/how-to-make-a-duck-tape-bullwhip/

Children's Book Review

I found these neat books at our public library. They are published by Pebble Books. Their website is www.capstone-press.com. The series we are reading is Insects and the some of the titles are Ants, Beetles, Bumble Bees, Cicadas, Crickets, Dragonflies and Fireflies.

These are nice, short books for younger children. They have a photo on one page and then a sentence describing the photo on the next page. At the end of the book there is a vocabulary list and also a list of related internet sites and more books. These books are at the K-1st reading level. Graham enjoyed reading these to Josh and Will. They were short enough to keep Will's interest and Josh loved the pictures (lots of great detail).

Our library has the insect series and we are currently reading through them. They also publish an animals and science series.

Here is a link to the page with these books.

http://www.capstonepress.com/aspx/pDetail.aspx?EntityGUID=880d855f-41ff-497f-b4f1-b0999f4ee6ae