What A Fellowship

We held our annual "Wild Game Dinner" at church Sunday evening, apart from all of the great food, we had a special speaker who brought a special guest.

Our speaker was Lowell Washburn, one of our own church members. Lowell works for the Iowa DNR and is an avid outdoors enthusiast as well as a Master Falconer. That fact brings me to his special guest, a live full grown Red-Tailed Hawk!


This Hawk was incredible! Lowell explained how years ago many referred to the Red Tail as the common "chicken hawk". Many of us see the hawks everyday as we travel, on the top of utility poles, dead trees (snags) and even on fence posts along the road. These hawks are woodland hunter, mainly subsisting on rabbits, squirrels and other smaller critters.

I got to have a very cool experience as I got to carry the Hawk into the church as we were setting up. I wore a leather glove and the hawk stood on my clenched fist. As I walked down the stairs to our fellowship hall, the hawk jumped off my hand! There was a leather strap that was connected to one of its feet that I held with my free hand. I simply put me gloved hand under its talons and it perched again on my hand and ARM! One set of talons on the glove and the other on my arm. The talons did not hurt me or break any skin but I could tell that without any real effort the hawk could easily pierce my arm to the bone! It was scary & really cool!

Following the hawk talk (a little Iowa Football lingo there) Lowell gave a very interesting talk of the different nesting habits of bird native to North Iowa. Now I know that your thinking "a talk about bird nests, are you kidding me" but it was truly fascinating. From eagles to yellow headed black birds to duck, geese and robins. All during his talk, Lowell made references to the handiwork of God and the brilliance of His creation. Overall, it was a great presentation and everyone seemed to enjoy it!

Following Lowell's presentation I had asked the Nichols family to bring there Science Fair project to the church to let every one see their version of the Ruben's Tube - a fire based tube. It's kind of complicated to explain so I'm going to let the Myth Busters do it for me!



On the video, the guys used solid tones, the Nichols used actual musical pieces such as "Taps". The result was fascinating! I even got a chance to use my iPod and play some Jazz which looked really cool as well! One person noted that it was amazing that God created our ears to work in the same manor. Sound waves impact our tympanic membrane (eardrum)and are then sent to the inner ear where the waves are translated back into sounds that we hear. WOW!

Thanks to Lowell and the Nichols family for making our evening incredible as we celebrated the world around us that God has allow us to enjoy and learn from!

I can not wait to see what happens next week around our church!