Contrariwise

As promised, I selected just 24 photos to represent the year, and hit every month except for April and September, I think. Click any to embiggen at Flickr.

Let's see if I can get one of those new-fangled LJ Collapse things to work...
( I think I got it... oh it's just the old LJ Cut... )

Thanks to all for the birthday wishes yesterday. :) We actually had gorgeous weather here, so I took the opportunity to do something I've been meaning to do for a while, which was get out kayaking again. It surprises me to realize that I probably hadn't been out for 2 years, and as soon as I got back out on the water, I remembered how much I just plain enjoy it. The river is lovely and the feel of kayaking is lovely.

This time, I was excited to get out on a stretch of the Charles River that I'd never been on before. Charles River Canoe & Kayak has several rental spots, all of which I've been to, but I didn't know they'd opened up a new one upriver at Nahanton Park in Newton, on a 12 mile stretch of the river unbroken by any dams!

In a sense, this was my downfall; so was going by myself. Because whenever I go out to do things by myself, I always wind up being over-ambitious. Previously, I think I have not done paddles much longer than about 6 miles round trip. This time, I took advantage of a little canal that cut across a big loop of the river -- at the end of which, I had to actually get out and walk through a waterfall over rocks (in flip-flops, because I'm dumb), dragging the kayak under a bridge to get back to the river and go back the long way, downstream. In my head, this made sense, because paddling downstream is always easier, and I'd noticed on the way out that the wind ought to be mostly at my back on the return. But I sort of didn't do the math in my head to estimate how long a trip that would really be. When kayaking, I tend to manage about 3-3.5 miles per hour. I paddled 2 miles to get to the half-mile short-cut. That brought me back to the river 8 miles upstream, which I then had to paddle all the way back to the rental site. And while I was indeed going with the current on the way back, the current isn't so strong that it carries you at any speed. So, yeah. That was about 3 and a half hours' worth of constant paddling, more than I'd ever done before, and the river was twisty enough that I still had stretches where I had to paddle against the wind.

But it was great, even if my arms are kind of limp noodles today.

I don't have any pictures of any of that, because I don't tend to try to mess around with electronics in a kayak, since it's all so wet. Instead, have some pictures from a few weeks ago, when Diane and Katie and I took a day-trip up to the White Mountains in NH. I was the instigator of this plan, because it has seemed for a while now, to me, that it is ridiculous that I have lived up here for over 20 years and never been up there, and never driven up Mt. Washington.



Many more pictures below the cut, half of cool animals and half of scenic mountain vistas: ( this way... )

Conclusion: the White Mountains are really pretty. And I want to see more waterfalls.

Of course, it is often owl-time around here these days, so what I mean specifically is, it's saw-whet owl-banding time!



( More under the cut! )

Tonight is "friends and family night", so I'm going back. We are just hoping like hell any owls show up. There was a 4th owl last night who flapped her way out of the net before we could get to her, so we're hoping she sticks around and gets in the net again tonight.

So now we reach the weekend of May 28th, which marks the last weekend spent stalking the great horned owlets. We arrived at Mt. Auburn and, to our great shock, found that the site of the nesting tree was empty. Really empty -- it lacked the police tape that had been strung around to keep people away from the tree, and it lacked the crowd of people with binoculars and cameras that had been gathered there each of the other times we'd gone. And the tree itself of course was empty of owls or owlets.

It's not fun to realize that they are probably still in the area, but good luck figuring out WHICH tree they're in. My recollection is fuzzy at this point, but I think what we did was walk back up to the information desk at the cemetery entrance, to see if anyone had earlier spotted them and noted it; and I think they DID tell us that the owls were still in the Dell area, so after a detour to try to find a screech owl that had been reported (we didn't find it), we made our way back to the Dell, and eventually spotted the owls by, essentially, looking for other groups of people scanning the tree-tops and hoping one of them could point the way. Which I think is what happened.

We discovered one of the owlets in one of the trees that the adult was pictured in the week before:



( More behind the cut... )

And that's it! I haven't managed to get back there since, to check up on them. As I said above, though, if the development of great horned owls is anything like the development of redtailed hawks, then I don't think the owlets will have flown off yet. They ought to still be in the stage of learning to hunt, and being fed by the parents. But as they get older and get more of their adult plumage, they are likely to fly farther and farther afield... and there are a LOT of trees in Mt. Auburn.

The summers when I've been able to stalk the redtails around Harvard have always been vastly helped by two things: the fact that there are a lot of buildings to perch on, which the hawks do, and you can at least SEE them on buildings; and the fact that at least some of the hawk babies have that extremely loud begging cry, which you can triangulate on to find them. While we did get to hear one of the owlets give some kind of call, which might have been a begging cry... it wasn't nearly as loud, and I'm just not sure if they do it as much overall.

Still, I should drop back in over there within the next couple of weeks, and see if any other birders have spotted them and noted the location. Maybe I can find them a few more times before they really do leave.

And here's hoping the parents use the same nest side next year. :)

First, thank-you to everybody who answered the name-change question. I decided to go with it, along with the suggestion to make a note in the LJ's sub-header line. And I suspect that I'll keep using the seasonal saw-whet owl pics that I've been using for a little while, which ought to provide a sense of visual continuity. Not to mention that you guys who pay any attention to what I post are probably used to the types of things I post nowadays. And that won't change, as this entry will show.

So! I am also incredibly behind on posting pictures. Several batches of photos and interesting events/news behind, in fact. So let's get cracking.



( Way more owls to see this way... )

Finally, because it's SPRING: a very vivid flowering dogwood near the cemetery entrance:



NEXT!

- petting sharks!

- owl developments the following week (or, this past weekend).

So, as I mentioned, I'm now volunteering doing wildlife care on Sat. mornings at a local Mass Audubon refuge. They have a facility with a bunch of education animals (that get taken out to schools and programs and stuff), and then they have some residents in the public area that people can see as they walk around. They aren't a rehab place. All of the animals they have (with the probable exception of the mice) are wild animals that have either been injured permanently so that they wouldn't survive in the wild, or else they're imprinted on humans and, same thing (or they'd be dangerous or a nuisance, because of the imprinting).

Mostly so far this consists of scraping up duck-crap and goose-crap, making their indoor enclosures nice and neat and clean for them to return to in the evening. I also got to do mice the other week. Eventually I'll get to do mammals (there are some woodchucks - so cute! - and some rabbits and an opossum). I don't know if/when I'll get to take food out to some of the education raptors. But it's curiously satisfying work.

The reward is that after all the cleaning stuff is done, we head across the road to deal with the public-view animals. There are some mammals (a couple of foxes, a rabbit, I think another woodchuck) in one facility, and then there are a bunch of flight-cages with various birds that, I gather, didn't take well to education-animal training. This part consists of going into the flight cages, refilling water, and scrubbing up "whitewash" and picking up pellets, and then leaving food for them -- which consists of a certain number of mice per bird.

So far, I've done the crow; and the cage with the one-winged turkey-vulture and pheasant (who rooms with the turkey vulture because it's not like the vulture is going to bother it; I was pleased because apparent the vulture is very old, and doesn't always take to everyone, but he didn't seem bothered by me and even spread out to do some sunning while I was in there); the broad-winged hawk; the two red-tailed hawks; the great horned owl; and the barred owls. (The only one I haven't done yet is the kestrel -- who is the most forward of them all, starting whistling as soon as she sees lunch coming, and she comes back to the door of the cage and clings to the mesh, begging to take her daily mouse out of your hand.)

I just wanted to share a few pics I took the other weekend of some of my new charges.



( More this way... )

Notably, I think I kind of started doing this at exactly the right time of year... so I'm interested to see what the experience is like [a] when it gets really, really cold (I actually recently bought a down coat partly for this reason), [b] when it's raining, and [c] next summer when it's hot and buggy. Fall is really the perfect time.

On a more current note... some of you may remember (especially when you look at the icons I've most frequently been using lately) that I reported last year on attending a saw-whet owl banding demo, which completely bowled me over with how excessively cute saw-whet owls are. (And seriously, their pictures have nothing on the owls in person.)

This year, I found out how to volunteer with the owl-banding project. So last night, I had my first volunteering session.



( Can you resist that face? No, you cannot... )

So, the exciting thing I promised on Friday (for certain values of "exciting") was that on Friday evening, I attended a saw-whet owl banding demonstration at Drumlin Farm Audubon Sanctuary. I really didn't quite know what to expect from this, but it sounded kind of interesting. I ended up at the "family night" session, so it was me, some parents with kids, and the Young Birders group.

Well, let me tell you, it was totally cool.



( More insanely cute pictures and explanation below the cut... )