Snow
December 15, 2008
The front yard this morning.
Last night it snowed here in Eugene. By morning we had about four inches on the ground, and it’s so cold it’s even stuck. And it looks like it’s going to be here all week too, as it’s going to stay cold. This much snow is no big deal for many places, but when a town has no plows and won’t salt the roads, well, things get messy. I drove to campus today, to go to the post office and the gym, and it’s not real nice on the roads. The cars pack the snow into ice, which then freezes hard, and voila, you’ve got a skating rink.
The current hummingbird rig. The lamps sit about eight inches from the glass bottle of the feeder. The hummingbirds don't seem to be bothered by the lights at all, they've been out there fighting over the feeder all day as usual.
I was up all night writing my OHSU essays; I peeked out the window at four-something to check the hummingbird feeder, and it was frozen solid–and there was a poor hummingbird just sitting there, trying to have some breakfast. I don’t know what he was doing up hours before dawn, but I took the feeder in and thawed it in the microwave.
When Brian got up we found the worklights and rigged up a more permanent solution, since it’ll be so cold all week, and hummingbird juice freezes at around 27 or 28 degrees. Now that I know they’re up so early, I’ll probably just leave the lights on tonight so they can snack when they need to in the morning. They go into such a deep torpor in this kind of weather, I bet breakfast really is the most important meal of the day when you’re trying to wake up from that.
Sumi keeping an eye on the hummingbird battles.
Big birds
July 27, 2008
Today I took a break from studying and Brian and I went to the Cascades Raptor Center.
There were three bald eagles at the center--but we see these all the time around here...
We’ve meant to visit ever since we moved to Eugene. We saw a talk featuring a dark morph Swainson’s hawk, and a “developmentally delayed” barn own. The birds on display are only the ones that have no chance of being released back into the wild due to serious impairment from injuries. They have 63 birds on view, and who knows how many more being rehabilitated.
You can't really tell from the photo, but these golden eagles were monsterous.
We got to see some birds being fed; the rodent eaters get dead mice or rats, depending on how big the bird is, and the bird hunters get dead chicken chicks. These white tailed kites, below, got two chicks each for lunch.
The two kites had brain damage due to heat stroke when they were fledglings.
The vultures had signs all over their enclosure, like every two feet, that said "I bite hard!" I wonder how many fingers this one has tried to take off...
One of the turkey vultures was pretty endearing, believe it or not. She was very imprinted on people, and was all about trying to get you to interact with her. She obviously had pretty good success in getting people to stick their fingers through the chain link, judging by all the signage.
Brian and the birds.
