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junco and an eagle
Friday, March 27 2020
It was another beautiful sunny day in early spring, with temperatures rising into the 60s. This morning when I stepped outside, there was such a riot of different bird songs that it sounded like Jurassic Park.
The internet being out severely restricted what I could possibly do in my remote pandemic workplace. So I ended up not really doing anything. I talked to Alex on the phone, but I couldn't even look at the documents to which he was referring, since they live in the cloud. While the voice-call function of my cellphone was working well enough for such calls, its ability to get data from the cell towers was unacceptably slow, often coming in at a trickle of 2-4 kiobits/seconds, a budget that was probably going entirely to updates, advertising, and information for the Chinese intelligence services. Sometimes when I'd reboot my phone, I'd get a few minutes of good data connectivity, but inevitably it would turn crappy again.
At some point I went into the field of our uphill neighbors ("the Greenhouses") in hopes of photographing birds. That fields is being overgrown in many places by saplings of white pine (and douglas fir, the latter seeded by nearby trees planted decades ago). Eventually I managed to take a picture of a small nondescript grey bird that looked like it might be some sort of junco.
Meanwhile Gretchen had taken the dogs for a long walk, and when Neville saw me in the woods, he initially didn't recognize me. So he started barking at me while adopting an aggressive posture, something he continued doing as I snapped pictures of him. Eventually I called out to him, and only after hearing my familiar voice could he relax.
A guy from Verizon arrived at aound 2:00pm, and I met him in the driveway, not approaching closer than about 30 feet. From there, I suggested he investigate the pole near the greenhouse, explaining how yesterday a guy from Spectrum had been climbing it with the help of spikes. The Verizon guy used a ladder, not spikes, and in about twenty minutes managed to fix the problem. From the laboratory deck, I told him that he'd fixed everything. From below, he told me that my suspicions had been correct and that a section of wire had been damaged in three places. All he'd had to do was replace that piec of wire.
An unusual sight late in the afternoon was a bald eagle flying in multiple loops overhead. I tried to snap some pictures, but none were very good. Meanwhile Gretchen has been seeing some interesting wildlife on her walks near a wetland between the abandoned go-cart tracks and Reichel Road. These included a pileated woodpecker, a male wood duck, and a bat flying around in the daylight.
A possible junco.
Neville not recognizing me.
A bald eagle overhead.
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