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
This critter has been ravaging the broccoli plants in Mary’s Vassar Farms plot:
Nothing to do but eat, excrete, and procreate in the warm sun:
Life is good!
She can’t bring herself to mash it, as she does with the myriad other critters having no redeeming virtues. Grasshoppers, it seems, have good PR agents.
A hawk, perhaps an immature Red-Tailed, landed on a branch outside the kitchen window while we were eating lunch.
After a minute or so, a squirrel ran up the maple and began taunting (?) the hawk:
The hawk obviously had no clue what’s going on inside that critter’s little brain:
The squirrel alternated between inching out on the branch, closer each time, and dashing back to the tree trunk, for maybe ten minutes. It eventually reached the rightmost patch of lichen, a foot from the hawk, without suffering any damage, after which it ran down the tree and away. We have no explanation.
Perhaps this is the same squirrel as before? All we know: (over)confidence goeth before gibbage.
Taken with the DSC-H5 near the end of the adventure; it took me a while to deploy the camera. The first picture looks diagonally upward from the kitchen, through three layers of 1950-era glass. The second comes from the back door, zoomed about 10x, with no tele-adapter. Obviously, good color correction didn’t happen here…
We spotted a classic example of deer damage at the corner gas / repair station:
The undamaged bumper below the smashed grill and hood is diagnostic; the legs bounce off the bumper, while the body punches the grill back through the radiator. The airbags didn’t fire, but I’m pretty sure that car is just as dead as the deer.
Plenty of deer-colored fur clinches the diagnosis:
A few days later, a vulture overflew me on Hooker Avenue:
It was flapping strongly, powering its way up to cruising altitude, which seemed odd that far into the urban heat island. On the return leg of the ride, I saw what had its attention:
All swoll up, as the saying goes, and ready for the carcass disposal crew…
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.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 