February is the month of survival in New England, as animals struggle to find food and hold out until the first signs of Spring. Beavers, red foxes and raccoons mate, and river otters give birth to their babies. Watch for the Snow Full Moon on February 5th, and the Lunar New Year ends the same day. The whole month of February is devoted to Black History Month. Even as people struggle with the wintery cold in the North East, people are celebrating the Mardi Gras Carnival down in New Orleans. Perhaps we can use February to reflect on the razor’s edge, and the necessary bridge, between surviving and thriving.
February 1st
First Day of Black History Month
Four African-American North Carolina A&T University students, began a sit-in protest at a Woolworth’s whites-only lunch counter.
Jerry Spinelli, author of Maniac Magee, a story about racial inequality, a racially divided community, and a white kid who finds a home with a Black family, b. 1941
Coyotes mating
February 2nd
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian, plotted to kill Hitler, b. 1906
Ground Hog Day
World Wetlands Day
Judith Viorst, children’s writer, author of the classic “James Alexander and the Horrible, Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” and many other notable titles, b. 1931
February 3rd
First paper money issued in America in the colony of Massachusetts
More than 450,000 New York City school children boycotted school as part of a protest for quality schools for Black and Latino students in 1964
Marlon Riggs black, gay film maker, Black Is ..Black Ain’t, b. 1957
Female foxes issue a prolonged rasping scream/call to call a mate that can be heard at great distances.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the U.S. Mexico War and extending the boundaries of the United States west to the Pacific Ocean in 1848
February 4th
Russell Hoban, author of the charming Francis books about a strong willed, girl badger, and a writer fantasy and experimental literature, http://www.ocelotfactory.com/hoban/ b. 1925
Black bears give birth to between one and five, usually two, blind, almost hairless, half-pound cubs, about the size of a chipmunk
Roy Plunkett received a patent for teflon in 1941
Walter H. Williams was the first Black teacher appointed to a Freedmen’s Bureau School in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana during Reconstruction in 1868
February 5th
David Wiesner, author and illustrator, of often wordless, magical books, my favorite being Flotsam, b. 1957
Wild turkeys make burdock balls by turning the burdock fruits inside out, eating the seeds, and leaving the empty husks in a ball
Congressman Thaddeus Stevens offered an amendment to the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill to authorize the distribution of public land in 1866
Full Snow Moon
February 6th
Great horned owls are the earliest species of birds to nest in the North East
Bob Marley, leading reggae musician, b. 1945
Mary Leakey, British paleoanthropologist who studied human origins, b. 1913
First microchip, integrated circuit, patented by Jack Kilby in 1959
February 7th
Flying Squirrels huddle together in tree cavities in groups of up to two dozen
February 8th
Jules Verne, writer of Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in 80 Days and considered a key figure in the literary avant garde, surrealism, science fiction, and children’s literature b. 1828
Boy Scouts of America founded in 1910
Two years before the Kent State murders, 28 students were injured and three were killed in Orangeburg, South Carolina — most shot in the back by the state police while involved in a peaceful protest, in 1968
National Kite Flying Day
Donna Jo Napoli, children’s writer, author of We Are Starlings: Inside the Mesmerizing Magic of a Murmuration
February 9th
Porcupines eat the the tasty buds of hemlock branches dropping “nip twigs” on the ground that hungry deer snap up
In one of the more spectacular demonstrations for women’s voting rights, the National Woman’s Party burned President Woodrow Wilson in effigy in front of the White House during the campaign for the 19th Amendment, in 1919
Joseph McCarthy launches his anti-communist campaign in 1950
Robert Fulton granted a patent for a practical steamboat in 1811
February 10th
Alister Hardy, British scientist , expert on marine ecosystems from zooplankton to whales, invented the continuous plankton recorder, b. 1896
Bob Dylan’s Album The Times They Are A-Changin” is released in 1964
E.L. Konigsberg, children’s writer and author of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, about two siblings who runaway to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, b. 1930
February 11th
Jane Yolen, prolific children’s writer of fun picture books like “Owl Moon,” “Plymouth Rocks,” and “Crow Not Crow” and hundreds more, b. 1939
Short tailed shrew survives February by living on food cached in the Fall. Shrews have very poor eyesight and find find food and move around by echolocation
Nelson Mandela is freed from jail after 27 years as a political prisoner in 1990
Russian Jewish anarchist, Emma Goldman arrested for distributing materials about birth control in violation of the Comstock Act in 1916
February 12th
Charles Darwin, scientist who developed the theory of evolution and wrote “The Origin of the Species,” b. 1809
National Association of the Advancement of Colored People founded in NYC in 1909
Jacqueline Woodson, prolific writer of young adult novels, the author of two beautiful essential picture books, On The Day You Were Born and The Year We Learned to Fly, b. 1964
Judy Blume, writer of young adult novels, author of Are You There God, It”s Me Margaret, b. 1938
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” was first publicly performed by 500 school children in Jacksonville, Florida. Later, the NAACP adopted the song as the Black National Anthem. The lyrics spoke out against racism and Jim Crow laws, in 1900
February 13th
Simms Tayback, children’s book illustrator of some classic nursery rhymes like I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly, There Was A Crooked Man, the biblical story Joseph Had A Little Overcoat, and designed the first Mcdonald’s Happy Meal in 1977, b. 1932
Activists circled the White House to protest the Keystone Pipeline, an oil system that transports crude oil from Canada to various locations in the U.S. in 2013
Snowy Owls, the heaviest owls in North America at over 4 lbs, need lots of energy sometimes eating up to 1,600 lemmings in one year and spitting up the indigestible parts in a pellet
Two ” smart bombs” kill 408 civilians in Iraq in Operation Desert Storm, in 1991
February 14th
Margaret Knight, invented a machine that made flat bottomed paper bags, b. 1838
Valentine’s Day
Bark, silhouettes, and buds are three characteristics that help identify trees in winter . American basswood’s plump, oval asymmetrical red buds are unmistakeable.
Paul O. Zelinsky, children’s book illustrator of classic fairytales, zany, surreal, fun, modern stories, and an over the top version of Wheels on the Bus, b. 1953
A telephone patent is granted to ALexander Graham Bell in 1876
February 15
Nirvana Day Parinirvana: Buddhist celebration of the day the historical Buddha died and achieved Nirvana, a time for reflection on impermanence, death and life
Largest peace demonstration in the history of the world, 30 million people in 600 cities, takes place protesting the Iraq War, in 2003
Benjamin Roberts, African American, filed the first school desegregation suit after his daughter Sarah was barred from a public school because of her race in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1858
Norman Birdwell, author and cartoonist of the Clifford the Dog books,b. 1928
Jan Spivey Gilchrist, African-American artist and children’s book author, known for spectacular mixed media illustrations, in such books as In the Land of Words, The Great Migration, Journey to the North, My America, and many others, https://janspiveygilchrist.com/ b. 1949
Northern Saw-Whet Owls courting with a monotonous toot,toot, toot that can travel over 300 yards
First draft of the human genome is published in 2001
February 16th
Honeybees will take advantage of a thaw to clean out their hives, and black capped chickadees will help themselves to a meal
Beavers, who are monogamous, mate
February 17th
Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher, astronomer, and freethinker, b. in 1600
Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, b. 1942
Old Egyptian festival of Neteret Bastet celebrating Maat the cat goddess who fosters domestic harmony
February 18th
Audre Lorde, feminist, lesbian poet, wrote Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches ( including “The transformation of silence into language and action”), The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name–a Biomythography b. 1934
Hercules, the head cook at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate and slave labor camp, escaped to freedom in Pennsylvania, in 1797
February 19th
Andre Breton, French writer, poet and principal founder of Surrealism, b. 1896
Minnesota Chippewa people win right to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice in 1972
February 20th
Faroe Islands’ Parliament declares nuclear free zone
February 21
Malcolm X assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom , NYC, in 1965
Presidents’ Day
First day Of Mardi Gras
February 22
Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides, b. 1857
Steve Irwin, the Australian biologist, zoologist, and nature TV show host, b. 1962
February 23
Loris Malaguzzi visionary behind the Reggio Emilia schools, b. 1920
February 24
Judith Butler, philosopher, gender, queer theorist, b. 1956
The Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” 1969
W. E. B. Du Bois, sociologist, historian, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor, was one of the most important scholars of the 20th century, b. 1868
Wilhelm Karl Grimm one half of the brothers Grimm, b. 1786
February 25th
February 26th
John Harvey Kellogg, creator of the flaked-cereal industry and founder of Kellogg Cereal, b. 1852
Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, was murdered. The death of Martin and acquittal of the man who shot him sparked the national and global Movement for Black Lives Matter, 2012
February 27th
American Indian Movement protest at Wounded Knee SD, begins in 1973
Uri Shulevitz, illustrator of many children’s picture books including Snow, The Golem, How I Learned Geography, and Chance: Escape from the Holocaust, https://www.urishulevitz.com/ b. 1935
February 28th
John Tenniel,illustrator, cartoonist, most well known for illustrating Alice in Wonderland and Through the looking Glass, b. 1820
