Another week has passed and Mr. and Mrs. Bluebird are still hanging around. He has built a new nest, in a different bluebird house mounted about 12 feet from my window. I presume it’s the same pair that nested in the house farther out – before the English House Sparrow evicted the Blues family. The Blues have yet to lay any more eggs.
Category: Environment
Bluebirds vs Sparrows
Saturday morning I saw something amazing.
We have been trying to get a pair of bluebirds to take up housekeeping in a bluebird house in our backyard. The trouble is, we have been unable to convince the House Sparrows that cloud the local air to give the Blues family a chance.
The world is alive …
Every spring I sit mesmerized as, in the space of just a few days, the mass of quarter-inch buds inexorably spread their petals in a real-time slow motion exposition of pink and white four-petaled flowers, each bloom more than two inches across.
The petals will shortly fall off, leaving behind next years buds, and life goes on.
Real cheese (mostly) ain’t yellow
Mystification surrounds the identification of the person who came up with the idea cheese would be prettier yellow, but it wasn’t someone who lived on a farm. In it’s natural state, cheese is white – or bleu, as in bleu cheese, which is laced with mold.
A Hope-ful story
I sometimes receive emails, and now and then a letter, from readers who say they like what I write. Recently, a reader sent a book that was extra special because it related a story near to my heart.
“Lab Girl: A story of trees, science and love,” by Hope Jahren, is a memoir of a woman who became a scientist before women could be scientists. She was born into a scientific family. Her dad taught introductory physics and earth science in a community college in Minnesota. Hope got to hang out in her father’s laboratory, where she “played beneath the chemical benches until I was tall enough to play on them.”
Who will clean up after us?
I watched a movie Tuesday night, along with more than 100 of my closest friends, many of whom I’d never previously met. It was about global warming, and about a preacher and his daughter and their disagreement over whether our home planet really is getting dangerously warmer.
More than just a pretty leaf
I feel badly for anyone who has never climbed a tree. there is some thing special and wondrous about the feeling of being up there in the small branches atmost where the birds fly free. Of course, sometimes that is a scary place to be.
Why?
Tuesday morning a young woman walked onto the YouTube campus in San Bruno, Calif., and shot three people before turning her 9mm pistol on herself. If one has been paying any attention to the news the past few weeks, two points should have stuck out.
The weapon was a pistol.
The shooter was a woman.
It was an eagle
L ast week I reported finding a hawk’s nest. Or maybe an eagle’s nest; I had not been close enough with the camera I had in hand to get a good enough look.
Searching for nothing in particular
I met a hiker on the Appalachian Trail Sunday. Actually, he was on the AT. He had been on the trail since Binghamton, NY, heading for a family gathering in Tennessee. I was on a woods road that crossed it.
Go outside and play
A male Northern Cardinal is snacking at the window feeder. It’s fun watching him chase off the House Sparrows. I dislike them, strongly, for the way they force every other species away. They don’t, mostly, actively attack interlopers. Mostly, they just crowd out any species that isn’t House Sparrow.
Geese another indicator of warming environment
I’m looking out my window at a killer snowstorm. Snowmageddon, it was supposed to be. The governor has declared a state of emergency for a large portion of the state, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike has banned several types of trailer-trucks.
Continue reading Geese another indicator of warming environment
Land of Opportunity
A deputy sheriff straps on a gun, pins his badge over his shirt pocket, and goes on patrol. Probably, he will return home to his family. Millions of law enforcement officers do the same thing every day.
Are you a hunter?
Sometimes the world seems small, and getting smaller. A young woman sat on her front step watching the baby play. I stopped to say hello. During our chat, we discovered she and her fiancé had been to visit a friend of hers and his in a state where I once lived. We chatted awhile.
Virtual Exercise
For the past few days, I have been full-on exercising. Virtually exercising, of course, in the tradition of 2018 electronic reality, as I watched young people compete in the World Series of exercising, the 2018 Winter Olympics.
How cold was it?
It snowed a couple nights ago. Road crews were out trying to make the roads unslippery. I met a former co-worker grocery shopping and mentioned I hadn’t yet pulled out my snowthrower or even a snow shovel. Where he lives, he said, a borough ordinance requires him to shovel snow – even when the wind would blow it away quicker and cleaner – from his sidewalk.
The confluence of birthrate and technology
IA teenage girl pulls out her smartphone, and flicks her finger a few times at the screen. A message flashes in a thought bubble to let her know her crescent and chai tea have been paid.
Winters passed and future
I have not yet pulled out my snowthrower. Foolishly, perhaps, I am counting on the Allegheny Mountains to keep from my door the 102 inches already dumped on Erie and other parts to my north and east.
Space: the limitless frontier
Sometimes I like to simply sit still and try not to move – to look up into space and ponder the stars.
You had to be there
I would like to visit North Korea. I would like to learn what wildlife calls the place home, and maybe why.