Oil Spills are bad enough – but how do you pray about a Tsunami?
It hasn’t been a year since the Gulf oil spill, which we rightly saw as the worst environmental disaster in memory. At that time I wrote a piece trying to come to terms with that situation: “How Do You Pray about an Oil Spill?” And now I sit pondering a disaster that could turn out to be exponentially greater than the BP/Halliburton fiasco. I am doing so at my dining room table, in a part of the world that is seismically if not politically stable, many miles from the nearest nuclear facility. I am looking out at a landscape where the first birds of spring have arrived and are singing up a storm: Robins, redwing blackbirds, a cedar waxwing and (I think) a pine warbler (see pic below and tell me if I’m right, birders!) just this morning. The contrast between my window and the stories on my computer screen could not be more different, and I am forced to ask the same question I asked last summer: How do I pray about what is now happening in Japan? Read more »
[Update: The robin watch is over. Duties called us away for four days, and in that time, all three chicks up and flew away. Bad timing - but the nest remains for use - next year?]
It’s getting a bit more difficult to follow our daily robin hatchling updates, so we’re changing the strategy a bit. One post, that we will update with an additional picture or two every day. We’ll keep the latest picture on top to make it easier to keep track of.
Five-day old hatchlings are now clearly showing signs of feathers growing in. They have about filled the nest, meaning they are perhaps three or four times the body mass they were when they hatched less than a week ago. Their two parents – I can’t tell who is Mom and who is Dad – have pretty much a full time job going back and forth to feed them. However, I suppose because of our relatively cool weather right now (in the 50′s this morning) most of the time when I examine the nest they have heads buried under each other.
Today’s picture (previous posts – click on the “robins” tag)…
Day 3 of the great Wisconsin Robin watch… we’re growing fast (compare the size of these hatchlings with yesterday’s post here). [Picture date 5/24/2009 3:24 pm.]
Oil Spills are bad enough – but how do you pray about a Tsunami?
