The Catholic Church has to adapt to the declining number of holy water-hens by use of reducing devices in their fonts; Cathedral of St Nicholas of Myra, Noto, Sicily.
Extinct Dwarf Elephant of the middle Pleistocene of Sicily. Much smaller than the extant Indian or African Elephant!
Different kinds of automated olive harvester at the G7 expo. In Morocco they use long bamboo canes and sheets to beat the olives out of the trees.
The view from our terrace at our pensione, over old stones. I love “A Room with a View”, to coin a phrase!
Our first full day in Sicily - though we arrived just before midnight yesterday- we awoke on the slopes of Etna. We were supposed to be in Ortigia- long story. Etna was having its morning smoke!
Black Skimmers on the beach at Santa Barbara. This is the closest that I’ve ever been to these birds and the only camera that I had was my iPhone!
The Scots-Irish were originally lowland Scots “planted” in NI by the British crown in 17/18 C but many left for America because of religious reasons as the Anglican hegemony regarded them as “dissenters”. The famine emigration came from all over Ireland but were predominantly landless Catholics.
The Scots-Irish from which JD sprung are not the same as the Irish who came after the 1840s due to the Famine. The former were originally Scottish Presbyterians who spent a generation or two in Northern Ireland before moving to America. The latter were poor peasants fleeing starvation.
A Great Crested Grebe + chick that I had the chance of seeing in a pond beside Lake Geneva, Switzerland.
