Beware the pogonip!
Today's birds
The striped birds are female redwinged blackbirds. You can just make out the bit of rose on their throats. Quite a contrast to the jet-black males with their beautiful red and yellow epaulets. The birds surrounding them are grackles. I tried to get a male and female together in the same shot but it was chaos out there with everyone moving around.
This handsome fellow is an Eastern Towhee. We had quite an assortment around the feeder these last few days. No huge surprise, I guess, given the weather.
Black-capped Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
Downy Woodpecker
Golden Flicker. Their main diet is insects - this one seemed to be attracted to the first bare patches of grass and dirt that started showing up next to the house as all of our snow and ice started to melt today. It wasn't at all interested in the seed or suet.
Eastern Meadowlark. I usually see these at the edges of un-mown fields. I've never seen one in our yard before. Like the Flicker, it zeroed in on the newly exposed ground.
It came right up close to the window before splitting the scene.
The bicolored redwings I saw yesterday are much more likely be females of the 'standard' redwinged blackbirds. Kudos to my wife for pointing this out.
Dusting the camera off made me want to go and recover all of my older bird photos. I had hosted them on flickr years ago, but pulled them down. Though I unfortunately seem to have lost the archive of my flickr albums somewhere along the way, I still have all the original RAW files, so I need to do a bit cleanup and editing, then invest in a better local backup solution. Probably time to pull the trigger on the NAS I've been considering for awhile.
In the meanwhile, here's a Trogon (T. violaceous or T. ramonianus, not sure on the sex):
I took this quite a few years ago in Costa Rica. It's one of my favorite bird pics - so colorful! Right now all I can imagine is how warm it is there. :|
Been eyeballing the bird feeder and have spotted some bicolor red-winged blackbirds. Sibley says we’re not really their normal range but there they are. Nice looking birds! If I can find an SD card I’ll try to get a photo with the good camera.
No barbecuing today I guess.
View from inside…this is my amateur radio antenna.
Thwack
You ever read something and then hear the whistling of an approaching clue-by-four? This is from Cassian's Institutes, Book 7 ("The Spirit of Anger"):
XVI. Sometimes, when we are overcome by pride or impatience and are unwilling to correct our unseemly and undisciplined behavior, we complain that we are in need of solitude, as if we would find the virtue of patience in a place where no one would bother us, and we excuse our negligence and the causes of our agitation by saying they stem not from our own impatience but from our brothers' faults. But, as long as we attribute our own wrongdoing to other people, we shall never be able to get near to patience and perfection
XVII. The sum total of our improvement and tranquility, then, must not be made to depend on someone else's willing, which will never be subject to our sway; it comes, rather, under our own power. And so our not getting angry must derive not from someone else's perfection but from our own virtue, which is achieved not by another person's patience but by our own forbearance.
I don't consider myself a particularly angry person, but I know that when I do get upset, I tend to linger in it far longer than is right. In fact, if I'm being completely honest, I'll invent reasons to stay angry - imaginary conversations where I always have the upper-hand against whoever has wronged me. I'll spin out long, drawn-out, completely imaginary scenarios in support of whatever has made me upset.
It is true that there is a place for righteous anger. It is equally true that the greatest part of our anger is probably not, unless it be turned inward against our own failings. Even then we must temper it with certainty of God's mercy. No wonder at all that the prayer most commended to us is O God come to my assistance! Lord, make haste to help me!
“The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers…. In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.
We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”
— Hillaire Belloc
Elderberry cuttings are coming along nicely
