I went back to look at the progress the tadpoles had made and discovered that the culvert that the ditch supplied had been replaced with a new one and the folks who did the repairing decided to dig out the ditch in order to make it deeper and clean it out.  It's now dry and no signs of any water for any survivors to hide out in.

What a bummer!

This morning I went out turkey hunting.

This is what the woods look and sound like at daybreak.

At a pond at the Cayuga Nature Center

One of the sights that kept me amused yesterday while hunting was this leaf. It was suspended from the branch by a spider web and danced around in the slightest breeze.

It's 63 degrees and a nice steady rain.  There is a crow strolling on the road.

I think I'll read on the front stoop.

Great Bustards are supposed to be the heaviest flying bird in the world, the largest known weighed 46 pounds, and typically have a wingspan of 7 to 8 feet.  They have been extinct in the UK since the 19th Century.  It seems efforts have been made to reintrodue them to the UK on the Salisbury Plain.

Here's the press release.

http://www.bath.ac.uk/news ( Read more... )

I hear some coyotes howling in the distance.

It's 7 and a bunch of crows are having a rather noisy discussion out back.   It must be interesting, they've been going strong for the past half hour.

It turns out that scientists have indentified fossilized melanosomes which contain the melanin pigments which give bird feathers their color.  This means it may be possible to know what colors and color schemes ancient birds and feathered dinosaurs may have had.

 This morning while taking Pumpkin out for her walk, I got to see a red winged blackbird land on a tree branch ( Read more... )