Endangered
Bird Week(s)
These are tiny little birds. Their body is about 2-2.5 inches long, and their tail is 3-3.75 inches long. They only have 6 spindly feathers on their tail. The feathers in their tail supposedly look like the feathers an emu has. The sparseness of their tail is probably why they are not very good at flying, preferring to hop around on vegetation while they look for insects to eat. They are from Australia, but their habitat has become very fragmented and their populations have been decimated from fires. There was at least one effort to start a new population for them, but that failed. Still, there seems to be a good bit of conservation going on for them.
I am really hoping that since I'm doing endangered animals this year instead of extinct or critically endangered animals, that more and more of them I will be able to say that there is help that seems to be working for them. While I want to do just gradients in the background for the oil paintings, for a bird like this that usually stays in the plant life, painting them sitting on the ground doesn't seem right. I will do a hopefully subtle something for them to be resting on. Having it with this pose but totally floating in the middle of a green gradient would look ridiculous.
My youngest had his first day of his senior year. It was also his first year of having to take the bus to school. For elementary and junior high school he went to a private school. We wanted to protect our introverted quiet kids who are kind, quiet, and potentially sort of lost in large groups. For a while there my youngest only had 6 kids in his class. It was impossible for him to get lost for sure! Yeah, it meant we had no money but we felt it was worth it. I had to volunteer a ton at the school to get as big of a discount as possible, and I taught art classes whenever I could. For high school though, we wanted our kids to have the electives that public schools offer. In small private schools like what I went to as a kid, we had almost no options for electives. We wanted our kids to be able to try out all these classes that offer a sort of taste of future professions. I don't care if my kids go to college, the military, or trade school, but I do want them to choose a career path that makes them happy.