birds

[Tad Eareckson]

Warm and rainy forecast yesterday - good cage blasting weather. Hauled all the stuff that needed it out onto the back deck and hooked up the pressure washer.

Let Quinn out for a flight or two and she was returning fairly promptly. One last time about midday out the front door in some light rain. She parked high in Tulip on the north side of the house, the rain turned on to a fair rate, and she stayed.

After a while she wasn't answering and I started to get worried - and later more worried. Then mid afternoon I heard her, she made a wide circuit out back, but landed low in some bushes at the far periphery.

She'd never been out in rain before and I figured, "OK, she's treating rain like dark, goes into roosting mode, don't sweat the silence so much, I'll get her back in the evening for dinner." Nuthin'. Called until the light faded, was pretty confident I'd get her back at dawn.

Dawn has come and gone, warm, everything's soaked and dripping, nothing, worried sick and hating myself. Been doing forum maintenance stuff to block out reality as much as possible.
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Update - 2017/07/07 13:10:00 UTC

She's answering from back beyond where I saw her go in. I'll have her back shortly.

[TheFjordflier]

And.....?
I'm getting too worried here.

[Tad Eareckson]

And here's the entry I was just about to post:

I DID get her back but sure as hell NOT SHORTLY.

She kept answering me - a bit intermittently - but was staying put. Started running unlikely scenarios - injured, caught - through my head and figured I should at least get a visual on her.

Geared up with Gore-Tex and binoculars and headed to the jungle. She kept talking and I waded in with a lot less difficulty than I'd expected but couldn't spot her until almost within reaching range.

Saw some sprigs bouncing about five feet up on the far side of a scrawny little six foot juniper to the tune of her threat display. I threatened her back and was able to grab her without getting bit - about 10:15 local time (14:10 UTC).

Body feathers were just damp at the surface, flight feathers were saturated. Did a test flight back in the house and it was about all she could do to maintain altitude. She put a good breakfast down pretty quick but was far from starving to death and I think she just didn't wanna fly if she didn't really have to. Sun's come out now but it sure isn't shining where she was holed up, humidity is 76, and it would've taken her forever to dry out properly.

So she got a good field exercise and I learned a little more about how these things tick. But a couple hours into daylight I had serious doubts about my prospects of ever seeing her again.

I LOVE to see her blasting through the understory and have her come back to me, let her hang out in the trees learning something about being a wild bird, be able to get rid of her for a couple hours when she's being a royal pain in the ass indoors - but there's always that element of risk and I'm not gonna hold up very well if anything worse than the Blue Jay happens to her. Really gotta manage this and be prepared to keep her grounded during the raptor sixty percent of the year.

Speaking of the Blue Jay... She's either a hundred percent or too close to tell. Pretty satisfied with her recovery.

And speaking of pain in the ass... She's in her breeding cycle and wanting a lot of contact, affection time with Yours Truly. When I'm in the La-Z-Boy with the laptop open she's cuddling and preening my left hand, sometimes attacking my right hand, doing all kinds of amazing things with the trackpad and royally fucking me up.

And two nights ago I fell asleep with her helping me and woke up with a lot of holes in my junker shirt and Dvorak keyboard cover.

In her cage now, fluffed, drying out, head tucked. Rough 24 hours for both of us.

[Tad Eareckson]

Had a moderate lightbulb moment since recovering Birdie yesterday. When they're compromised - roosting in the dark, soaked and clumsy, injured, sick - they are NOT gonna announce their presence / reveal their position. They're not evolved to expect help and are evolved to expect predators and threats from their own.

Yesterday when the rain hit she was high up in a Tulip on the north side of the house about the same location she was when she got Blue Jayed on 2017/05/09 (two months ago tomorrow). I remember the instant she went silent - about a minute before my heart started pounding.

Then again yesterday I knew right where she should've been and started getting scared shitless when she wouldn't give me the slightest trace of an answer. And it wasn't until latish morning and she'd had a little drying time that she started talking again.

She's got a big Tulip just off the back deck that she's established as her outdoor territory. Hangs out in it for hours sometimes and does threat displays and vocalizations whenever I appear. When she wants back in she'll fly down to the deck railing and announce her position when I'm inside or fly to my fist when I'm on the deck.

Sometime I need to take her somewhere far away and safe for a fair chunk of a day and get her trained more to come to me and less keyed into just coming back to her home turf.

P.S. Got a bleeding hole punched in my right hand getting her out of her cage first thing this morning.

[Tad Eareckson]

Observation regarding Quinn...

Lotsa free range time since those two Blue Jay interactions mid spring. And it's a virtual certainty that there hasn't been anything in the way of an interaction with anything since.

She's now very comfortable selecting good perches and hanging out on them for hours. Pretty sure that she attracted the hostile interest she did 'cause she was transmitting subtle fish-out-of-water vibes.

Want to take her well away from her home range and cut her loose to get her signed off for coming back to me in a foreign environment. As things are she only comes back to the back deck or me (or the cage) on the back deck.

[Steve Davy]

I don't recall reading about TWO Blue Jay interactions. I'll need to go back and do some rereading.

[Tad Eareckson]

The first hypothetical / highly likely and consequential, the second observed and not.

[Tad Eareckson]

A month from today:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Solar_eclipse_1999_4_NR.jpg

http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52005355838_f3ea1f4d8c_o.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Solar_eclipse_1999_4_NR.jpg/780px-Solar_eclipse_1999_4_NR.jpg

Next New Moon is Sunday. The one after that will completely block the disk of the Sun across the US on a path from Pacific coast of Oregon to the Atlantic coast of South Carolina - as I'm sure everyone's already heard many times at this point.

I'm geared to link up with my nephew in Helena and make a dawn raid on the Snake River Plain in SE Idaho. Thinking...

- He's out there.

- We're close to a mile up through the atmosphere.

- Although the duration is greater easter - maxing out in the tips of Illinois and Kentucky - so is the threat of a weather system blanketing that half of the continent along the path.

- We'll have maneuverability on the flats of that area and be well situated to dodge late developing crap - like cumulus OD. And if things really got ugly with enough warning time we could make Casper which has all the advantages of Plan A plus - and another ten seconds duration.

Links/Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse
Solar eclipse - Wikipedia

http://www.greatamericaneclipse.com/
Total solar eclipse of Aug 21, 2017

http://xjubier.free.fr/en/site_pages/solar_eclipses/TSE_2017_GoogleMapFull.html
USA - 2017 August 21 Total Solar Eclipse - Interactive Google Map - Xavier Jubier

http://eclipsemega.movie/
Eclipse Megamovie

http://www.seymoursolar.com/
Seymour Solar - Eclipse 2017
http://www.seymoursolar.com/files/styles/uc_product_full/public/SolarFilterspic001%5B1%5D.jpg?itok=oSNmvLQ8


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0_QKTwvRBQ


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9ULsJwbW8s


I so hope people can get this one. My idiot parents let me miss 1970/03/07. Left me in Annapolis to take a stupid fucking PSAT test while taking my brother and sister down to Norfolk, to where we'd moving that summer, for entrance exams for a private school, at which I'd do my senior year, and that just HAPPENED to be on the path of totality. Could've taken the stupid fucking PSAT that morning down there or the next weekend or the next half dozen weekends up here. Didn't understand what I was missing back then and that it would be nearly a half century before I got another shot. (But I did great on the stupid fucking PSAT test - for all the good that ended up doing me.)

[Tad Eareckson]

Just confirmed my first home feeder Hummer for 2017 about a half hour ago. I'd put the feeder up in June and again earlier this month / a couple weeks ago but was obviously getting zilch and pulled it back in.

Eclipse countdown - three weeks / three quarters of the moon minus a day.

They've started talking about predicted traffic issues around the path of totality and they're pretty horrendous sounding. I was rather naively/stupidly harboring a vision of maybe a couple dozen cars trickling in to my selected little spot the middle of nowhere in the desert but now I'm thinking that it'll be a lot more like Woodstock.

The rental car pickup time is noon the day before. The local times are:
- 10:14:33.8 UTC - Partial Start
- 11:32:45.2 UTC - Total Max
- 12:56:25.9 UTC - Partial End

The normal roll time is four and a quarter hours but I'm thinking a midnight launch would be a good idea. And I'm also thinking that it might be impossible to dodge a late developing meteorological disaster much larger than a cumulus cloud.

[Tad Eareckson]

Twelve US States (two just barely) get hit by the Center of the Path Of Totality. (And a tiny little corner of another catches an edge for as much as 35.3 seconds of mid day night but don't worry about it for the purpose of the exercise.)

But, counting the entrance and exit beaches, the centerline crosses a state(s) line 19 times - 6 more times than one might be inclined to think.

How?
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Edit - 2017/08/02 17:20:00 UTC

The centerline of the Path Of Totality hits twelve states:
OR ID WY NE KS MO IL KY TN NC GA SC

Same dozen for the South Edge.

But the North Edge picks up TWO more. Iowa I knew about and that was what I was referring to. But I missed Montana. Its southern line follows a windy Continental Divide which projects into the Path twice - the first a matter of about 55 feet and the second about two and a quarter miles for a max of 49.7 seconds worth - up at about 10.8 thousand feet. (Had to redo the whole goddam edge because of that slip-up.)
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Edit - 2017/08/03 11:40:00 UTC

The South Edge DOESN'T hit the same dozen states the Centerline does. It misses North Carolina. (The South HALF picks it up though. (Obviously.))