Birdbrain(speaking of urban wildlife)

So we've got this adolescent scrub jay who comes into our house and eats the dog's food. I suppose this is mildly amusing, though it is very exciting -- and annoying -- for the dog. However, the bird will not leave by the way it comes in (usually this one window, though when that's closed I believe I have seen it come in by the dog's door, which is a tunnel with a latchable door on it, and not a rubber flap -- it's really cute and the outside looks like a little gable with its own slanty roof. No, a mansard gable I think you call it, or a shed roof? Anyway it doesn't make a peak, it slopes down from the wall.)

The idiot bird keeps trying to go out the larger windows, which are not open. It bashes itself regularly against these windows. Frank has rescued the bird personally four times -- this morning it bashed its empty little head against the bathroom window and fell into a bathtub full of thankfully tepid water. It is not a tame bird and it threatened Frank as he approached. Frank considered wringing the little moron's neck or giving it, sodden feathers and all, to the cat or maybe the dog. The cat is utterly uninterested in scrub jays, to the point that he ignores them completely when they attack him. Did you know that orange cats are picked on by birds more than other cats? Loki's the orange type of cat, though he was kind of pink as a baby and now he's sort of beige.

So anyway, Frank did rescue the bird this morning and put it in the sun, and it dried off successfully, and got itself trapped in the house again this afternoon. I took pictures this time.

( pictures )

Hawk pictures from Lighthouse Field

I don't know about the baby hawk Nadine says she saw. What I saw today was just an adult hawk hanging out on a snag, turning its head in a direction that forced me to photograph it into the light. I could get really close to the dead tree, but since it is what? 50 feet? tall -- my house is 25 feet at the peak and if I imagine two of them stacked on top of each other I guess that's about how tall it is -- there were diminishing returns when I got too close because I had a bad angle on the thing.

So these are cropped, not resized, and that's just the quality you get with the zoom out past the max optical and into the digital (is it necessarily the case as I have found that the digital zoom is just not as clean as the optical? -- and do other cameras send you through the optical zoom and then stack digital on top of it when you run out of optical?). The nice fellow has been begging to buy me a telephoto lens and I finally said he can, and a wide-angle one because I keep not being able to get a good handle on landscapes, and he can buy me a tripod too because if I'm going to do more bird and landscape pictures I need to be a lot steadier.

( our raptor friend lurks behind the cut )