by Justin
Did you know that I went on a 1 night cruise for my 10th birthday last month? The ship’s name was the Ruby Princess. We traveled from Vancouver to Seattle. The Ruby Princess was more like a huge floating deluxe hotel than a boat. It had …
Hawk Watch was super cool. I went to this awesome place two times. Hawk Watch is a program run by falconers and scientists to help preserve the Ramona Grasslands and benefit the education of the public about hawks. During our visits we saw five flight …
The beautiful mountains of Alpine are home to a very fun activity. Recently, we went to Sky Falconry (click here to learn more) and met Denise and Kirk, two falconers who know a ton about birds. During my visit I got to take their female Harris’s Hawk (formerly known as a bay-winged hawk), Steam, on a walk.
As soon as we got up the hill, Steam dove into the bushes trying to grab a mouse; although she missed. Later, she got territorial and dive-bombed a Red-tailed Hawk. An amazing part of our walk was flying the hawk.
I got to bring her to my glove by saying (or yelling) “Give me Steam”!!!!! She would use the ground effect (which means the closer to the ground the hawk gets, the less energy it uses to travel the same distance because of less drag) to fly to the glove. Steam would fly onto your glove from: a tree, a perch, a telephone pole, another person’s glove, etc. The first time that she landed on my glove, it was shocking. The more that she landed on my glove, the more comfortable I became with her and it was actually beautiful. To land: she opens her wings, stretches her legs out, and latches her talons onto my glove .
At the end of my visit, I got to throw a day old chicken foot into the air for Steam to catch (she missed mine and Dad’s, but grabbed Mom’s out of mid-air)! This was an experience that I will never forget.
The Doge’s Palace is an impressive historic building with a humongous set of brick and marble walls. It is located in St. Mark’s Square next to the Basilica San Marco. The Great Hall has intricate multi-colored mosaic ceilings and shiny gold accents. Many of the paintings …
Verona is a beautiful city not far out of Venice. We got there on the Frecciarossa; a bright red high speed train. When we got there it started raining, so we hopped on a road train and took a tour of the city, starting and …
I was out for a bike ride on the Silver Strand in Coronado, and found a seagull by a dog park. When I noticed that it was flopping around, we called SeaWorld and three people and a truck came out to rescue him. They got him in a net and put him in a blue box to transport him back to SeaWorld. I named him Rings because he was a Ring-Billed Gull.
They said that he was stuck in fishing wire and they took him back to the vet. Even though they did all they could to help him (including giving him antibiotics and untangling the fishing line from him), Rings died. However, they are still going to check out what happened to him, which could help save many other birds.
The SeaWorld Rescue Team took me on an awesome behind the scenes tour of their rescue center (which can also be set up as an oil spill rehab center). At the rescue center we saw 5 grebes, a ruddy duck (that I named Pothole), a great blue heron, a jaeger (aka arctic skua), and a baby fur seal (cutest thing in the universe if you ask me)! They are currently working to save all of these animals and release them back into the wild (if they can).
A special thanks to Heather and the rest of the SeaWorld Rescue Team who gave me inspiration to write this blog post. All of the work and effort that they put in to try to save Rings, and all of the other animals that they have rescued and tried to rescue, is amazing. If you ever find an injured seabird, seal, turtle, sea lion, whale, dolphin, or porpoise (a dolphin is also a porpoise, but not all porpoises are dolphins), this is the number to call: 1-800-541-7325. And here is a link to their site: SeaWorld Rescue Team.
Murano is a totally awesome island in Italy. It is home to the famous Venetian glassblowing; I got to see a cup and a horse being made. I also got to try glassblowing myself. At first I was nervous because I did not think that …
I have taken lots of slow shutter pictures in my life. A slow shutter picture is when you set the camera’s shutter to open the light path for one second or more. It creates amazing streaks of light shooting through the pictures like lasers. If …
I think Vittorio Costantini is the best glass blower in all of Venice (he is better than all of the glass blowers in Murano combined)! He makes birds, bugs, and fish using a blowtorch on the main island of Venice. The blowtorch is so hot that he needs to use a kiln to cool his work down!
He has a huge personal collection with tons of work in it (my favorite was the magpie because it is very shiny). He gave us a demonstration of how he made birds using rods of glass, a blowtorch, and handmade tools like a plate of metal to make bird tail shapes. I watched him make an azure tit just like the one you will see in the featured image.
He had a very precise technique, and the concentration that he needed to get every detail, from beak to tail, was amazing. He worked in a glass factory in Murano when he was 11 years old. He played a prank on a girl working in the factory… he picked up a blowpipe, dipped the end in melted glass, and BANG! A bubble formed on the end of the tube, expanded, and exploded like confetti (he used this same trick to make the back of the magpie shiny). He showed us this trick in his shop and the glass confetti got all over his books and he needed to dust them off. I bought an azure tit, but I was debating a sunbird. I am very glad that I got my azure tit before someone else bought it. It is very beautiful and he spent a lot of time on it.
My mom and dad got two rainbow trout.
Vittorio is a very unique and amazing artist because he makes all of his work using very beautiful colored glass rods (he makes some of the colors himself by blending two other colors). Vittorio and his wife Graziella may have been the nicest people that we met on our trip. If you want to see more pictures of his work, click here: Vittorio’s Work. Here are videos if you want to see how he works with glass (or go to Venice yourself and visit him): Vittorio in Action (look at video 2 and see if you can guess what he is making before he finishes).
Venice has boats instead of cars, so I decided to write a post about it. I got to ride on a ton of boats in Venice. The water taxi is the most expensive, the fastest, and the coolest boat in Venice (but the other boats were …
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