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.
Other creatures in our world
There’s obviously something going on inside the long-abandoned nesting box:
You’ve seen this happen to people, too:
How many sparrows can fit on the roof of a bird box?
There’s always room for one more:
Perhaps they were having a family reunion?
Taken with the Canon SX230-HS from the patio, zoomed all the way, and ruthlessly cropped.
“Our” Cooper’s Hawks have long since flown off, although one occasionally swoops through the yard on an urgent mission. I took this picture on an early July morning, when they were still being companionable:
Taken with the DSC-H5 and 1.7x teleadapter, zoomed in all the way, and dot-for-dot cropped. The birds look fine and the image looks awful…
I didn’t notice this at the time:
The camera runs at 60 frame/s, so the entire show spans a bit more than half a second: zzzzzip!
I think it’s a member of the Yellow Jacket wasp family, noted for their in-your-face attitude and repeat-fire stinger. They’re highly capable flying machines, that’s for sure…
We were pulling out of the local “health food” store with fresh-ground nut butters in the packs, nearing the end of a 17 mile loop on a fine Sunday morning.
We are not dog people, so being awakened at 12:45 one morning by a large dog barking directly under the bedroom windows wasn’t expected. After a bit of flailing around, I discovered the dog parked under the windows on the other end of the bedroom:
That’s entirely enough dog that I was unwilling to venture outside and attempt to affix it to, say, the patio railing, where it could await the town’s animal control officer in the morning:
It’s not a stray, because it wears two collars: one with leash D-rings and the other carrying a black electronics box that could be anything from a GPS tracker to a shock box that’s supposed to keep it inside one of those electronic fences. If the latter, a battery change seems past due.
Being a dog, it spent the next two hours in power-save mode on the patio, intermittently moaning / growling / barking at every state change in the back yard: scurrying rodents, falling leaves, far-distant sirens, neighborhood dogs, you name it. We would be dog people to want that level of launch-on-warning, but we’re not.
If parvovirus were available through Amazon Prime, I’d be on it like static cling. By the kilogram on Alibaba, perhaps?
Grainy photos taken in Nightshot IR mode with the DSC-F717, which works well enough after I (remember to) jiggle the Memory Stick to re-seat the ribbon cable connections.
Hat tip to Sherlock in Silver Blaze.
Mary used a garbage can lid to shelter some plants, left it in the garden for a while, and a critter moved into the new shelter. She first noticed two well-prepared front entrances:
And a rear entrance or, perhaps, the emergency exit:
Gingerly lifting the lid, she found a dismantled bird corpse:
Along with a large stash of sour cherries from a nearby bush:
A good-size toad kept an eye on the proceedings:
We didn’t know toads ate sour cherries, but the evidence seems clear:
The image of a toad taking down a bird can’t be unseen, but, more likely, a recently fledged nestling took shelter and couldn’t figure out how to get out again.
We’ll never know the rest of the story.
New hawks must somehow learn that swooping across roadways doesn’t work like swooping across lawns:
We think one of “our” new Cooper’s Hawks didn’t survive its lesson.
That’s the third dead hawk we’ve seen on recent rides; it’s been a rough few weeks for new hawks. Mary also spotted a smashed owl along one of her routes.
Yeah, they’re just birds, but …
Cropped and tweaked from a Sony HDR-AS30V helmet camera image.
Hawks lack waterproofing, which means devoting the morning after a torrential downpour to drying out:
The dark bar across its back comes from an overhead utility line.
The male sparrow of the pair nesting in that box wasn’t pleased about the situation:
Not much he could do about it, though …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 