The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Taking & making images.
The sparrows started building a nest in our front-yard box, but progress seems intermittent…
A pair of Cooper’s Hawks have been hauling off rodents and shredding songbirds at a steady pace, so we think they’re nesting nearby.
Taken diagonally through two layers of rather dirty 1955-ish window glass with the Sony DSC-H5 and the 1.7× tele-adapter, so it’s not the best of images… but if I were a rodent, I’d be worried!
We almost stepped directly into this scene:
A closer look at the carnage, seen diagonally through a pane of 1955-era glass:
The Cooper’s Hawk remained frozen in place while I got a better view from outside:
It then flew away with the gibbage in its claws, leaving us a doormat covered with feathers.
We’re not sure if the meal was a mockingbird or a Downy Woodpecker, but we’re apparently short one bird…
The maple at the far end of the driveway sprouted sapcicles (or maybe sapsicles) after a brief warm spell woke it up in early March:
You can break them off and eat them like Popsicles, but they’re not nearly as sweet as you’d imagine. We’ve boiled sap into syrup and can report from personal experience that the 40:1 boildown ratio is no myth…
This one grew along a trail in the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies forest:
It makes a great landscape monitor background…
This wonderful texture lives at the top of Cochran Hill Road, where I spotted it on a recent walk. That tiny hole on the right trunk suggests more trouble than meets the human eye…
It’s now a background for the portrait monitor.
This critter lived at the Cary Institute for Ecosystems Studies in Millbrook, back in 2006. I have no idea what it grew up to be, but the picture is one of my all-time favorite portrait-mode monitor backgrounds.
Hand-held with the little Casio EX-Z850 camera (which is now with our Larval Engineer), ruthlessly cropped from a much larger image, and resized to fit the monitor…
I spotted this bit of engineering while riding on the Dutchess Rail Trail at Lake Walton:
Evidently, the beaver stopped just before the tree toppled, because the last cut looks very much like a chainsaw.
I didn’t spot their lodge out in the lake; they may have tucked it under the bank below the railroad bed.
If they keep this up, they’re sure to get trapped and moved somewhere they can’t interfere with our enjoyment of the natural landscape along the rail trail. [wince]
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 