THANKS! And a Few Birds.

Joy and I just want to say a big THANKS to YOU, our ministry support team!  We couldn't be here without your faithful prayers and generous ministry support.  And recently several of you have been a blessing to our family above and beyond the norm.  Thank you!  If you ever have any questions as to what's going on behind the scenes here, either with us personally, or with the ministry, or with our support or finances, or whatever, please don't hesitate to drop us an e-mail at any time.

This week I'm scheduled to be set free to fly on my own here in Uganda, East DRC and S. Sudan.   If all goes according to plan, I'll make one more flight on Tuesday up to S. Sudan with another pilot riding along, and then on Wednesday I'm scheduled to make my first "solo" flight, which will be to East DRC.  The rest of the week I have additional flights scheduled to various places.  Since everyone we fly is involved in missions or NGO work in some way, it's always encouraging and exciting to hear their stories.  There's a lot of critical ministries going on here, which are being directly facilitated through MAF.  And I'm thrilled to get to be a small part of that.  I hope to slowly begin taking more pictures as I get accustomed to the local cultures and dynamics in each place.  So keep checking back here.  Thanks to Hansjoerg for snapping the one above.

Well, I promised you some shots of a few birds, so here they are.  We're not the only ones flying around out at the MAF airfield.  These Hadada Ibis are actually quite an annoyance and hazard to the aircraft.  And man do they have a loud squawk!  They love to squawk outside our window early in the morning.

Here's what they look like up close.  They're a big bird and more than one has been hit by a plane on takeoff or landing.  They're often in groups of several or more.

Speaking of planes and birds, there's a whole bunch of Pied Kingfishers that like to claim the "King of the Mountain" spot on top of the MAF planes' rudders.

But they're not the only Kingfishers around.  The bright blue Woodland Kingfisher is especially fun to see, though they seem to be a bit more shy.

This one was pretty far away so I couldn't get a very good picture.  I think it's a Speckled Mousebird, not as colorful as some of these, but sporting a pretty cool spiked hairdo.

This male, Double-toothed Barbet was sure colorful though.  

Perhaps our favorites were the Black-headed Weaver birds.  The males are bright yellow, with vibrant, red eyes staring out from a black head.

These birds are master weavers.  There's dozens of nests in the weaver tree, and many birds constantly hard at work making and fixing these works of art.  The males work feverishly to construct the perfect nest for their females.

However the females aren't necessarily easy to please.  If they don't like something about the nest they simply cut it down and the males have to start again from scratch.  Below the tree are a bunch of nests that didn't make the cut...or did.

Here's a female doing a very detailed inspection.  In the background the male nervously watches, hoping that she loves it!

These are just a few of the birds we saw during our picnic last week out at the MAF airfield.  Uganda is a great place for birdwatching.  There's so many amazing and colorful species here.  And we continually marvel at the beauty, imagination, and detail of our Creator!