Turkeys

Let's see what we can find out about turkeys.

First we need to get in our turkey blind so we can hide from them. 

This is the most common of the five subspecies, the eastern wild turkey.

It's an adult male.  You can tell because the beard, which looks like a horse tail but is actually made up of modified feathers, is long.  In some populations of wild turkeys, up to 20% of the females have beards, but they're a lot shorter than the male's.

In the early 1930s, there were only about 30,000 turkeys in North America due to hunting and the loss of habitat.  They vanished from 18 of their native 39 states.  State wildlife agencies and The National Wild Turkey Federation are responsible for bringing the population up to 7 million.  This was done through a combination of trap-and-transfer and conservation efforts.  

Even so, populations are starting to decline again, particularly in some of the southeastern states, by 30 - 65% in the last decade.  Scientists think it's a combination of factors including an increase in predators (raccoons, coyotes, and feral hogs) and a decrease in habitat quality and quantity (primarily through unsustainable timber harvests.) 

 

Tradition tells us that turkey was part of the first Thanksgiving feast at Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, in 1621.  But is that true?

There's only one surviving document, written by colony governor Edward Winslow, that describes the feast.  He said they "sent foure men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoyce together after we had gathered the fruit of our labours."  According to the culinary expert at Plimoth Plantation, when an Englishman referred to "fowling", he usually was talking about water fowl - geese and ducks.

Another commonly-held belief is that Benjamin Franklin proposed the wild turkey be the national bird.  Not so.

People were misconstruing his comments in a letter to his daughter.  He said the bald eagle was "of bad moral Character".  The wild turkey, on the other hand, was "a much more respectable Bird ... though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on."  But these were just observations to a family member, not official proposals.

Females feed the chicks for only a few days after they hatch.  Males don't feed them at all.  It could be worse.  At least they let them hang around so they can all forage together.  Some wild animals, like lions, sometimes kill cubs that they haven't sired.

Most of the turkey's diet is vegetarian, aside from the occasional insect, amphibian, and reptile.  And most of their foraging is done on the ground, although they sometimes climb shrubs and trees to get their food.

Domestic turkeys have white-tipped tail feathers, not brown ones like this.

This is an adult, because all the tail feathers are the same length; jakes (immature males) have longer feathers in the middle.

The turkeys we saw this day got to stroll past these tamarack trees.  Tamarack is an Algonquian word that means "wood used for snowshoes".  

Take a look at the huge feet on the turkey in the previous photograph.  They're almost built-in snowshoes.  Big feet are good at scruffing up the ground while looking for food.  Plus, you need big feet to support that big body.  Males generally weigh between 11 and 24 pounds; females between 5 and 12 pounds.  The largest male weighed by The National Wild Turkey Federation was 37 pounds. 

Gratuitous, pretty, shot of a shrub that was in the foraging area of the turkeys.

So what have we learned from our turkey research?

We learned this is NOT a turkey.

And we learned they can't read. 

Juvenile Embroidery Book, Page 8

This week I finished another page in my juvenile embroidery book.  Earlier this year I predicted I would have them all done by the end of December, but I still have twenty or so to go.  I don't know why I keep predicting when things will be done, since I'm so bad at it.

This is one of the few times I used such a light-colored floss. I think the only other time was for Carousel Pony.  Part of me wanted to use something that stood out more, but I also wanted a realistic color for the goose body.  Plus this way, the supporting objects are featured.

I like the way she has her eye on that butterfly.

Here's the inspiration fabric.  It was kind of hard to find something with a goose on it, but there she is on the left.

In fact, for the twenty blocks I have left, I've been having trouble finding fabric with the same subject as the block.  This weekend I was able to find three more, so I'll be set for a little bit. 

This is sort of how it will look in the book - fabric on the left page, block on the right page.

I already started the next one - it's a bunny.

The Next Round of Charity Quilts

Last Saturday I got together with some friends from our quilt guild to work on charity quilts.  I hadn't made any since June, so I decided it was about time I got back at it.

This is the fabric for one of them.  It started with a HUGE block you can see peeking out in the center background.  Somebody donated it and it wants to be the centerpiece.  The owl fabric on the left was donated, but all the rest is from my stash.

This is the fabric for another; all of it was donated.  

I have the blocks cut out and I started piecing it.  I have a grand goal of finishing it by this weekend.  But then I also planned on sewing all day today, and I haven't started yet.  I still think it's doable, because it's going to be baby-sized.

I love green.  It's the perfect neutral, in my opinion.  It looks equally good with both spring and fall colors.

Faces

I was reading about facial recognition technology recently in an article published by Cargegie Mellon University.  I didn't realize how far it had come.  It's a little spooky.  

In the olden days, it took a person to recognize a face.  Now it's done through augmented reality, which means computer-generated input plays a big role.   It's currently possible, with greater and greater degrees of accuracy, to mine publicly available online social network data with face recognition technology to produce automated, real-time profiles of people. 

Suppose you have your picture taken and you don't even know it because you're part of a crowd.  Maybe you're out shopping.  Maybe you're in somebody's Flickr photograph, have a profile on match.com, or were captured on a webcam.

Now suppose you have a Facebook page with a photograph of yourself.  Software finds a match, and they now have the name you used on Facebook, presumably your real name, along with everything else you've revealed about yourself.   Facebook is a particularly good way to make a match because their privacy policy does not allow privacy settings on your name and profile photograph.

If you're not on Facebook, maybe you're LinkedIn, or part of a government or corporate database.  Anything with a photograph tied to your name can be used to identify you.  It's even possible to take an anonymous photo from a dating website, run it through facial recognition technology, and find a match to a publicly identified person on Facebook. 

Some of the data is easy to find and directly tied to you, like your Facebook friends and interests.  Many websites keep information about you and they also sell the information to third parties.  

Other sensitive information, non-publicly available, such as credit scores, SSNs, political and sexual orientation can be correctly inferred as part of what is known as data accretion (the gradual accumulation of individual parts until a whole picture is built.)

Facial recognition, just one piece of data accretion, is used by Google's Picassa, Apple's iPhoto, and Microsoft's Kinect.  All those photographs that are stored on the cloud are fair game for mining.

 

Face recognition is hampered when your eyes and/or nose bridge are covered. And of course, the less information you reveal about yourself online, the less can be known.

For more information, watch this 15-minute TED talk, Why Privacy Matters, by Carnegie Mellon's Professor Alessandro Acquisti.

Tea for Tuesday

This is a porcelain teapot from Linden Hills Pottery.  I have quite a few items from them.  This one is 12" tall.

They are made by a husband-and-wife team.  Bill does the clay forming and background spraying.  He studied under a potter in Japan for two and a half years.

Cynthia brushes on the detail.

The various ceramic stains are applied in layers.

In 2012 they won the Best in Ceramics award at the Madison Art Fair Off the Square.

National Button Day

Today is National Button Day.  I made a "button" project this week, but first let's look at my real buttons.

A bowl filled with wood, shell, and other natural buttons.

Metal ones.

Just a few ceramic ones, really heavy.

Oldies with an antique spool gifted by a friend, just today.

Novelty buttons.  My favorites are the flapper face and the Victorian boots.  Must make something with them soon!!!

Vintage jelly jars full of plastic buttons.

Warm ones from the jelly jars look good enough to eat.

The cool colors from the jelly jars.

 

A friend brought these from Tender Buttons, an entire store of buttons, located in Manhattan.

And of course, pig buttons.  The one on the right is a gift from a friend.

Back to my "button" project.  I saw large fake buttons hanging on a wall on some blog the other week and decided I needed some in my sewing room.  I don't know what their's were made of - they weren't very visible in the photograph - but around here, I like to make things out of frisbees.

These were on sale for only 77 cents each, on account of them being Halloween frisbees.  The Christmas ones were $1.29 and that is still tons cheaper than what I paid for the frisbee I bought to make my clock.

I lucked out when my husband volunteered to drill holes in them for the "thread." 

All I had to do was decoupage fabric over the top.

A little yarn through the holes, and voila - buttons.  Compare to the size of real buttons, on the left.

Tomorrow these big guys go up on the wall.

Still not had enough of buttons? There's the National Button Society.  

Many states have their own societies, e.g. the Wisconsin State Button Society, whose 2nd Vice President is Charlotte Ann Button.  Check out the award-winning buttons from 2012.  Also the ones from 2011.

For books, there's Buttons by Diana Epstein and Millicent Safro, founders of Tender Buttons.   This book is available in the library system.  Diane also wrote The Button Book, and A Collector's Guide to Buttons.