THE SONGS OF A NIGHTINGAIL

  Going high:  My granddad, Frank Herbert Bradley, and a friend sitting at approximately 8000 feet in elevation on Overhanging Rock on Glacier Point, 3214 feet above the Yosemite Valley floor. Going low:  Yours truly, 7 years old, looking up out of a granite hole in D.L. Bliss State Park, Lake Tahoe.  Actually the hole was at a relative elevation of 6500 feet. Going high: My husband atop 13,061 ft. Mount Dana in Yosemite National Park.  He climbed this mountain 20 years ago.  He was in pretty good shape but even so, during the last 1000 feet or so. said because of the ‘thin’ air he could only take a half dozen steps at a time before having to stop for deep breaths! Going low, or in this case, subterranean: A few years earlier – in 1983 – we had gone to visit friends up north and wound up visiting the Oregon Caves National Monument in Cave Junction.  Those stairs go way down there!   Going high:  My three kiddos up a pine tree.  “Hi Mom” A few years younger, the top tree-climber going l

  The R  ppell’s Griffon Vulture, with an 8 foot wingspan, can reach a flying height of 37,000 feet! The little blue Fairy Penguin is a flightless bird who lives at sea level on the shores of Australia and New Zealand.  It is only 12 to 13 inches tall and is cute as the dickens. J    The sweet little Inaccessible Island Rail bird of Inaccessible Island, an extinct volcanic island off the coast of Tristan de Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean is a flightless bird with small useless wings.  Its ancestors must have been able to fly once upon a time, however, which is how the birds came to be on the island, but as no predators exist on the island, the birds have no need to fly and have gradually lost the ability to do so.  Humans have lived there from time to time, but no one lives there now.  The terrain is not all that inviting.  See the next photo . . . The little flightless Inaccessible Island Rail lives on the beaches and central plateau of the island. The Large-eared Pika, a close co