Slow News Day

Literally. Not just a slow news day, the very definition of Slow News Day.

OMG!! Ducks in the water! Including interviews with witnesses who actually saw ducks in the water! The poor sap assigned to this "story" stayed on scene and was reporting updates right until they went off the air.

My apologies for not being able to embed the video directly.

(And, yes, those are the Nina and Pinta in the background, docked here on their way up the coast.)

Hawks and Doves

Out walking in the 43 degree pale dawn sunlight and realized the local hawk was standing not more than ten feet away from me in the burrowing owl "enclosure." (The staked out area that tells the city maintenance crews were not to mow.) We stared at each other for a couple of moments before it came to me:

"You're not. . .hunting . . . OWLS!? Are you?"

He looked at me, then one of the burrows, then back at me and slowly took off to land on a telephone pole across the street. So, that was my answer, I guess.

I backtracked a little from my walk, later, to see if he had gone back to the owl site but there was no sign of him.

I mean, for crying out loud, there are two to three dozen mourning doves just down the street hanging out on the telephone lines overlooking the bin of cracked corn the elderly couple put out for the Muscovy ducks every morning. Go have some pigeon for breakfast!

They're Baaack!, or, The Return of The Birds

Hah! Two movie refs in one title!

During the height of the Hot/Rainy Season most of the birds seemed to disappear. I haven't mentioned vultures or raptor tornadoes because they simply weren't there. No parrots, no mockingbirds. For a while (after a week of torrential downpours that raised the water table to about a foot below surface level) even the owls were nowhere to be found. Now the humidity has dropped, the temperature has dropped and the birds are back!

Including really ugly Muscovy ducks and . . .

. . .some sort of black duck, possibly female Gadwalls or maybe young Mallards and

the local neighborhood Red Shouldered Hawk . . .

. . .which I last saw sitting in a concrete faux-fountain birdbath on somebody's front lawn.

Best of all the owls are back (if they ever really left). Three different sites along my morning walking route have at last four different owls in them (total).

So all is right with (this little corner of) the world!