Library at the Edge of the Galaxy

My nature documentary obsession: Life, season 1 episode 2

Happy Fourth of July! We’re celebrating with our national emblem, the bald eagle.

Once on the brink of extinction, the bald eagle’s recovery is an American success story. Today, its population is protected, healthy, and growing.

Some Bald Eagle facts:

The bald eagle is the only eagle unique to North America.

Nests are sometimes used year after year and can weigh as much as 4,000 pounds.

Bald eagles may live 28 years in the wild.

Bald eagles get their distinctive white head and tail only after they reach maturity at 4 to 5 years of age.

Find this diorama in the Museum’s Sanford Hall of North American Birds.

girls supporting other girls

bisexuals supporting other bisexuals

writers supporting other writers

From September 1947 until January 1949, the Declaration of Independence crossed the country in a traveling museum called the Freedom Train.

A group of 27 Marines protected the 133 documents, which came from the US National Archives​, the The Library of Congress​, and private museums and personal collections.

The Freedom Train stopped in cities in each of the 48 states (Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states), and the documents it carried were seen by more than 3.5 million Americans.

True to its name, the Freedom Train mandated that the admission lines for the exhibit were to be desegregated. Memphis, Tennessee, rejected this condition; in response, the Freedom Train did not stop there as scheduled.

After a successful national tour, the Freedom Train arrived in Washington, DC, for President Truman’s Inauguration Week. At the end of the week, the scrolls of 3.5 million names signed under the Freedom Pledge were donated to the Library of Congress.

excerpt from “Open Letter From Frankenstein’s Monster To Victor Frankenstein” by Alex Dang!

This poem and others can be found in my book.

Bobtail Squid (Sepiolidae) are a family of cutesy, wutesy cephalopods found mostly in the tropics.

They’re not proper squid at all,.being more closely related to cuttlefish, and that might be why they’re so short and squat they’re also known as Dumpling Squid.

These are some of the smallest cephalopods, reaching some 1 to 8 cm long depending on species.

Most of them spend a lot of time on the seabed, since they’re not proficient swimmers. They spend the day buried in sand, even secreting a kind of glue to ensure a good disguise.

At night they go on the hunt, swimming about by flapping their wings and snatching up small crustaceans and the like.

A lot of Bobtail Squid have a light organ on their underside which is packed full of luminescent bacteria. The light organ can be opened and closed to emit just enough light to mask the Bobtail’s silhouette from the eyes of predators as it swims by the light of the moon.

This is just the same tactic used by many deep sea creatures and, in fact, there are some intrepid Bobtail Squid who live in the deep sea and some pelagic ones who never touch the sea floor at all.