Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
“Our” pair of Cooper’s Hawks (or their descendants, of which there have been many) hatched a pair of chicks that recently fledged and have been exploring their world:
New Hawks – standing tall
Sometimes they perch together:
New Hawks – companions
Their world contains many interesting things, not all of which are visible to the human eye:
New Hawks – curiosity
I’ve spotted a parent hawk circling high overhead while the youngsters practice their flight skills near the treetops. If you listen carefully, you can hear a hawk calling from far above:
New Hawks – parent overhead
We’ve seen them hopping from branch to branch, testing their wings, and by now they can launch from a standing start:
New Hawks – liftoff
New squirrels emerge at about the same time, with equivalent levels of experience:
New Hawks – curious squirrel
Right out of the nest, new hawks know what to do, if not quite how to accomplish it:
New Hawks – vs New Squirrel
That little squirrel instantly pasted itself to the bottom of the branch and escaped. This time, anyway.
Mary watched one hawk practicing its pouncing skills by attacking a pine cone. A talon wedged under a tight pine cone scale, to the extent that the hawk spent the next half hour flopping around the yard trying to part company with its personal Pine Tar Baby.
Perhaps the piles of Chipmunk Gibbage came from a new hawk practicing its regurgitation skills …
Go, new hawks, go!
Taken with the Sony DSC-H5, sometimes with the 1.7x teleadapter, under ambient light, hand-held, sometimes braced against the frame of a partially open door.
Returning from Rochester & Points North, I spotted something in the rearview mirror that could have been either a Yellow Submarine or a storage tank. As whatever it was got closer, the view got weirder:
Bears on I-87 – approaching
Huh. Who’d’a thunk it?
Bears on I-87 – passing
A stiff crosswind pushed them all over the lane:
Bears on I-87
I hope they arrived at their destination with the shiny side up and the rubber side down.
Yes. Yes, it does, at least from a grass-like ground cover.
I’d leaned the bike against a Blue Loo, turned my back, took four steps, and wham down it went.
The upper front rim of the skeleton case ended up firmly pressed against the ground, with the lens safe. A slight smear from the greenery wiped off easily, with dirt embedded between the fake fur and the case, exactly where the lens would stick out in its normal orientation.
The extensive garden armor remains effective, although we know groundhogs can run straight up a chain-link fence when given sufficient motivation. They generally give up after encountering the galvanized chickenwire around the buried concrete blocks; the garden is just to the left of the picture.
The front-yard groundhog suffered a fatal automobile accident shortly after it finished excavating its burrow against the front foundation. This critter may have moved into the abandoned summer home near the garage at the back of the house.
If you know what you’re doing, you can measure the size of the sun and scale the entire solar system from observations like that. Takes more science than I’ll ever accomplish, that’s for sure!
I realized the show was on just before Greatest Transit (roughly what you see above), so I duct-taped a 1 inch spotter / finder scope to a camera tripod, taped a sun shield on the scope, bent some card stock for a screen, then assembled everything on the patio:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 