My Word with Douglas E. Welch

I am a board member of Friends of the Island Fox and help do a variety of work to preserve this threatened/endangered species that live just right off our coastline. They are amazing animals and I highly encourage everyone to visit the Channel Islands (Santa Cruz Island is our usual destination) and spend some time among the foxes and other nature. It is a relatively quick 1.5 hour trip out from Ventura Harbor vis Island Packers. A great way to spend a day.

You can find many pictures of the channel island fox on my Instagram and Flickr photo accounts.

As a Valentine’s Birthday gift to me (and the foxes), please consider a donation to continue our work to protect and educate the public (through school programs and Road Scholar presentations) about this amazing animal in their own backyard.

You can donate any amount by visiting the Friends of the Island Fox web site and clicking the donate button. You’ll also find tons of information there about the foxes, their habitats, their issues and what we and our donors have done to help them, the National Park Service, The Nature Conservancy and many others.

Won’t You Be F257’s Valentine?

It’s February – time to help the unique island foxes that live on California’s Channel Islands!
Why does Friends of the Island Fox ask for your donations? 
Funding is essential for island fox conservation.
You can help this pup. Won’t you be her Valentine?

Island fox F257 is a female 10-month-old island fox. Last summer she was captured on Santa Rosa Island during annual health checks. A sample of her blood was taken, she was micro-chipped, and a whisker was collected for diet analysis.

In December of 2019, she was fitted with a radio-tracking collar funded by FIF and had another whisker removed for analysis.  
All of this work–the examination and work by the technician; blood sample testing, the microchip, radio-tracking collar, and diagnostic research on the whiskers–requires funding.

That is where you can make a difference. We ask you to donate, so FIF can help fund important island fox conservation work across the Channel Islands in conjunction with the various island land managers.

Pup F257 has so much to tell us.

Throughout her life, when captured, her microchip reveals her identity. Her data, gathered during annual check-ups, will form her profile history. Data collected on individual foxes is valuable for researchers and understanding how to keep island fox populations healthy and stable. Her radio collar will monitor her movements and safety.

The analysis of her two whiskers will tell us how her diet has changed from a very young pup to her life at 10 months old. If the winter rains don’t return and F257 faces her first year in drought conditions, will she change her diet? FIF’s Research Grant recipients are investigating important science on island fox health. Are foxes finding adequate nutritional food in their island ecosystem? Can we expect F257 to live a lifespan of 8–12 years?

This young pup is starting her life on Santa Rosa Island. You can be part of her success. Your donation will help make sure she is watched over and healthy.

Follow Me On Instagram!

When the rule of law ends, the rule by mob begins!

No one is above the law!

Protect the rule of law around the world or we risk a descent into madness.

From my Instagram Feed

I love time-lapse videos and often create them myself, but never to the length or hard work required to created the videos detailed here. I like time-lapse because I think it can help us see the unseen in the world around us. As one example of this, we don’t really notice the movement of the sun across our home or garden as it happens much too slowly to really capture our attention. Speed up time though, through a time-lapse and we can clearly see how and where the sun is traveling about our environment. Analyzing the movement of people in a space is another great use for time-lapse. You can see patterns that might not otherwise be obvious at normal speed.

Most phones have the ability to easily create time-lapse videos. Try it out for yourself. What is happening around you that might benefit from a little “seeing differently.”

Once you’ve made a few time-lapse videos, trying slowing things down with your camera’s slo-mo features and record an entirely different world. — Douglas

The design site Dimensions.Guide is a clip art library for designers, architects, and anyone else who needs precise scale drawings. Every scale drawing in its database is composed in the same clean line-art style. Drawings include sports equipment, cars, furniture, people (in various poses and sizes), computers and phones, plants and animals, room and landscape layouts, and even Marvel characters. And it’s all free to use in your own projects.

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

Through the Great 78 Project, the Internet Archive has been digitizing the audio from 78rpm records produced from 1898 to the 1950s. Over 25,000 high-quality recordings are currently available from artists like Edith Piaf, Irving Berlin, Lena Horne, and Duke Ellington. This preservation is important because the discs are fragile: