This is such an old thread, I hope someone interested in herons still will see it. We’re in Texas, a few miles from a marsh preserve. First time in 15 years, a juvenile Yellow Crowned Night heron visited our pool/spa last week. She was here for a few days. She flew in again today. She likes to sit in the spa - it’s quite amusing. She sits with water up to her shoulders and dunks her head. The water is probably over 95 degrees, as today’s temp is 100, with feels like temp of 108. My worry is that she may not be eating enough to nourish her. We of course have no fish or crustaceans for her. We do have small lizards, some toads, frogs, and field rats. The rats run the fences, sometimes climb adjacent tree, forage flower beds and gardens. Every night I see what I tell myself is the same rat, ‘running the fences’. For many years there was a very large field one street over; now it is just large. Is anyone aware of herons feeding on rats? I wouldn’t worry about her so much if she was capable of catching those fast little critters. A couple of those per night would be a good meal, I would think. Oh, we also have opossums that come in baby season. Baby possums would also make a good meal for the heron. I have seen them swimming on the baby ledge of our pool. That was crazy. Seems the wildlife uses our pool more than we do these days.

The concept of warm and cool colors predates most of the scientific tools we have today to measure color. It originated from the concept of warmth vs cold. the Oxford English Dictionary describes 18th century usage to include: Cold - applied to tints or colouring which suggest a cold sunless day, or the colder effect of evening; esp. to blue and grey, and tints akin to these. Warm - suggestive of warmth, said especially of red or yellow ... to become 'warmer' or more ruddy: "On a bright morning of July, when the grey of the sky was just beginning to warm with the rising day". I always conceptualized the concept as warm-related to the heat of the sun or cool of the water. The scientific difference deals with the sensitivity of the S cone. I am not a neuro science expert, but it has something to do with thresholds of the S cone and how colors change as they are desaturated. Blue goes from blue to darker and darker blue, but we still perceive the color as blue and we name the colors as blue light blue, sky blue, navy blue. When we change the chroma Blue goes from bright blue to gray blue. You can't do the same with yellow. We only see yellow in very specific ranges of light and chroma. We call dark yellow gold or brown and as we desaturate yellow it can either move toward green or violet. At the lowest saturations there isn't any yellow or orange or red. Have you ever heard someone describe a gray as a dark yellow gray? Nope. Beige can be pink, yellow, gold or green and gray can be green gray, blue gray or violet gray. So when the hue is yellow and it is desaturated it becomes olive green or brown - moves toward red or toward green it never stays yellow. At some point it moves to either a green gray or violet gray and looses any association with yellow. Grays are innately cool. - related to water, not the sun. Do you ever picture the sun as gray? Do you ever picture water as yellow? Where is the break between cool and warm? At what level of chroma do we determine that a yellow is no longer warm, but has moved into the cool zone? That may actually depend on your physiology - some people see more colors than other and can discern subtle changes in color better than others. It may also depend on the levels of dopamine in your system - we see colors more vividly when dopamine levels are high than we do when dopamine levels are low. I don't know if their is a definitive answer to your question about Chantilly Lace. Is it above or below the S cone threshold? It seems that the color experts at Benjamin Moore agree with many other color experts and define it as a cool white so my guess is that it is beyond the threshold of chroma where we actually perceive the color as warm even if it is in a CIE LCH hue that is generally associated with the Munsell Yellow Green hue family. BTW - CIE LCH Is linear in nature, where Munsell is not. The Muncell hues curve when mapped against LCH hues. The curvature expands as chroma and luminance are reduced. How we see color and how we measure color are not perfectly correlated.

"I prefer the term 'coastal' to beachy. LOL" Me too! This discussion is of interest to me as we are finishing a gut remodel of our house that we bought as a second home. I decorated fast and inexpensively with a lot of beachy themed stuff from furniture to wall art. Baskets of shells, baskets in general, walls painted shades of fairly intense blue and aqua etc. Lots of beachy Home Goods type artwork for the walls. 5 years later we live here full time and I'm more than ready to switch out from the Margaritaville AirBnB theme decor style. Eld, I love your look and I think you are spot on with your colors, style and decor. Here is more than anyone probably cares to know about how I'm trying to achieve the same blend and mix. I'm going for a coastal modern mix. White shaker cabinets in our kitchen, both bathrooms and office. This is my quartz countertop inthe kitchen and office. Kitchen is getting black bar pulls and black faucet to play off the veining in the counters. Maybe a black simple chandelier over the dining room table which will hopefully be this if it comes back in stock along with some kind of natural fiber chairs. And I'm putting these countertops in the bathroomsalong with a coastal blue/green mosaic shower surround tile with these faucets. Here's the store picture of my new couch, loveseat (didn't buy the chair) and coffee/end tables though I probably won't use all three of the tables together. Our windows have white plantation shutters so the above is similar to what the view looks like above our couch-our windows aren't quite so lavish though. In my house if you are standing at this angle in my living room, to the left are a pair of 12-foot sliders that face the water. So the room is flooded with light all the time. That slider along with 3 other large ones are all getting Hunter Douglas white roller shades, again a simple coastal look with a modern twist. Our new flooring is light wood look tile that's 5 feet long and 12 inches wide-again coastal but with a modern feel, not a wood facsimile. I'll be using some jute area rugs. Using this Benjamin Moore color for the 'public' rooms: kitchen, bathrooms, living room, hallway and office. It reads as a neutral but with a very, very pale blue tinge, enough to make a nice contrast with our trim which is squared off large base and door molding painted white. Bedrooms will be this Sherwin-Williams color which again is a super pale calming hint of green neutral. For art I'm thinking of stealing an idea I saw somewhere and liked a lot: enlarging some vintage family pictures to poster size and framing them with a simple metal or black frame. I've got tons of pictures of parents, kids and my spouse in natural/water settings so I'm hoping that will be a nice way to have a personal touch while keeping things simple. And last but not least I'm leaning toward a couple of Audobon bird prints so I'm right there with you Eld! Flamingo is a no brainer, again large and framed very simply. Probably another tropical/shore bird like a pelican or anhinga. So there you have it and once again Eld your home looks beautiful so go for what you want!

Isn't it wonderful that we all get to choose how we spend our free time? I have been painting with oils and acrylics for 50 years. I love color. I love studying the science of color, the emotional impact of color, how color impacts our mental health and how color measurement differs from the human perception of color. I enjoy understanding color trends and how they relate to our economy and social structure. I don't look at this as work, it is simply something I enjoy, like baking pastries from scratch, canning fruits and making home made jam, growing roses that have amazing scents, making my own candles and soaps and playing with fragrances, playing with my dog or renovating my home. You must have other interests that are more interesting and provide you with more joy than mixing paint colors to get that illusive shade that is just not quite what SW or BM have decided to produce.