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 pair of Double-crested Cormorants took up residence for a few weeks on the pond at Vassar Farm:
The rubbery blue feet should be diagnostic, but don’t appear in any of our references. They’re definitely not Blue-footed Boobies, that much we know.
They’re XORed with turtles on the same snags.
Hand-held with the Canon SX230HS at full zoom across the pond.
Back in the early 1950s, Anderson’s state-of-the-art awning windows had screens on the inside: you must open the screen to open or close the window. This surely seemed like a good idea at the time, but in practice we don’t open the screen very much, very often, during peak insect season, as insects tend to collect on the outer surface.
We’ve learned to live with the smaller bugs, but this critter gave me pause one evening:
It’s a Hunting Spider (or, more exactly, a Wolf Spider), perched on the outside of the screen, inside the (opened) window. The (hard inch) screen grid is about 70×55 mils, so those legs span about 2-1/8 inch, call it 55 mm.
We’re big fans of spiders, but this portends a bit more intimacy than I’m comfortable with. I blew through the screen to tickle its tummy until it moved outside the window frame, then opened the screen and closed the window without pause.
Wake up with one of those on your pillow and tell me how it works for you.
I donated the last of Mad Phil’s stuff to a local nonprofit’s tag sale, where it helped bulk up the bottom line a bit. While I unpacked the van, a grasshopper stopped by to supervise:
I’m sure Dad worked from a model while he did this drawing:
You couldn’t imagine something like that if you’d never seen one…
The green background in the top picture is a sine-curve drafting template. Remember drafting templates?
It’s always a good idea to open the barby lid before firing the burners: sometimes unexpected things appear:
The mouse being out and about at the time, I dumped the nest (which was just a foundation) over the patio railing into the flower garden, burned out the remainder at full throttle, and continued the mission.
A week later, the mouse had not only returned, but finished off a substantial nest in the same spot, topped with a jaunty bird feather. The entrance tunnel is on the right, opening into a comfy mouse-sized pocket inside:
Once again, I dumped the nest over the railing, burned out the rest, and continued the mission.
As of three weeks later, the mouse hasn’t returned; I trust it found a hollow log somewhere out back.
As nearly as I can tell, the mouse climbed up a square steel leg, scampered through the grease catch pan, leaped up through the drain hole, wriggled through three layers of crossed bars, and then deposited a single mouthful of building material.
I really need a critter camera…
Four of these ferocious Parsley Worms were chowing down on a volunteer dill plant along the garden fence:
Amazingly, they turn into Black Swallowtail butterflies that sometimes visit the Butterfly Bush outside our living room window. Well, maybe not this one, but certainly some of its relatives.
We don’t hassle them; they have a fearsome threat display that apparently works wonders on their natural predators.
We don’t often see Turkey Vultures on the ground, so this gathering was unusual:
The depression in the grass suggests something keeled over right there; perhaps they’re rummaging around for leftovers. Although they’re totally graceless on foot, it works well enough for them.
There were two vultures on posts when I stopped, but one joined the ground party before I could deploy the camera. The other bird kept a close eye on me throughout the proceedings:
Look alive!
Pix from the Canon SX230HS, zoomed to its optical limit, and certainly not prizewinners…
Late August is, as always, the season for giant orb-weaving spiders, one of which spun a web between two tall cactus plants on the patio and greeted us with this sight one morning:
We’re big fans of both spiders and dragonflies, but it was obvious who came out on top in this contest:
These things are unimaginably weird:
Even with the spider busy at lunch, she has four eyes to spare. They reflect the flash and appear as white-centered dark dots near the middle of the image:
I’m sure the red spinnerets are diagnostic:
The spider tossed the empty husk over the side, then spent the next two nights and days parked in her lair, presumably digesting that big meal, and didn’t bother repairing the web:
She spun a fresh web on the third night and caught a more manageable insect:
All hand-held with the Sony DSC-H5, some with a 2x close-up lens. All the pix are tight crops, crushed to fit my arbitrary 750 pixel maximum and 200 kB size limit. If you need high-res original images for anything, drop me a note; I took far too many pictures of this encounter…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 