Browsing: Nature

A Brief History On May 4, 1894, educator Charles Babcock, superintendent of Oil City, Pennsylvania schools, established “Bird Day” on May 4 in order to advance the celebration and conservation of our feathered friends. Digging Deeper Other “Bird Days” include International Bird Day (April 13) and International Migratory Bird Day (second Saturday in May, or May 13 this year).  The 2017 theme is Stopover Sites: Helping Birds Along the Way. As birds are extremely important to the environment and to the welfare of mankind, we will take a moment to recognize some of their important contributions to the ecology.  For…

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A Brief History On March 15 and 16, 1952, over a 24 hour period the most rain ever recorded in a 24 hour period fell on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, on the area known as Cilaos.  An unbelievable 73 inches of the wet stuff fell on Cilaos,  a commune first settled by escaped Malagasy slaves known as “Black-Browns.” Digging Deeper Apparently slaves in that area of the world were referred to as “Browns,” and runaway slaves (I prefer the term, escaped slaves) were called “Black-Browns.”  Believing themselves safe on the highest ground of the island, these people were…

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A Brief History On December 31, 1853, one of the strangest dinner parties held to that point in history occurred when the Crystal Palace Park of London was host to a dinner inside the mold of an extinct dinosaur. Digging Deeper Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and Sir Richard Owen had been contracted to construct replicas of 33 dinosaurs by the Crystal Palace company, formerly the site of the Great London Exhibition of 1851.  Commissioned in 1852, the exhibit of extinct dinosaurs and ancient mammals was called the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs or simply Dinosaur Court.  Open to the public in 1854, the…

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A Brief History On November 12-13, 1970, an Indian Ocean cyclone with winds over 150 mph hit what is now Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) killing more than three times the number of people killed in the Atom Bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined! Half a million people died in the low lands of the Ganges River delta, mostly from the storm surge that flooded the area. Digging Deeper In addition to massive loss of human life, thousands of homes and other buildings were washed away, thousands of acres of crops were destroyed, thousands of domestic and wild animals died,…

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A Brief History On November 7, 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus made his epic voyage to the New World, a large meteor fell on the town of Ensisheim, Alsace, Austria, in what is now France. Seen as a falling fireball 100 miles away, the meteorite (when it hits the ground, a meteor becomes a “meteorite”) landed safely in a wheat field. Digging Deeper The 280 pound rock left a crater 3 feet deep (not bad for a rock that size) and was quickly set upon by curious villagers. Contrary to popular belief, people back then were not a…

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