infant mortality

My weekend went well; we canoed, watched ospreys at a distance, and saw thousands of little snails (er, the earth variety...) clinging to reeds and saltmarsh grasses. There were also civil war history, ice cream, more mosquitoes than home, and the turtles went off beautifully, even if #23 needed a little help sorting out that it was supposed to go get in the river instead of digging a hole in the sand. (Admittedly, it hadn't had the opportunity to do either in quite some time.) Elsewhere, most of the people I hang out with at the Aquarium these days were holding a dying baby dolphin to keep her blow hole out of the water.

(the article is reasonably good, though they could have used some editing-- as opposed to the first article they ran when Maya's calf died, headlined "Baby Dolphin Found Dead in Pool." When asked what they were thinking, the editor is reputed to have said, "well, it's what we say when there's a body in the harbor," as if the difference between adult humans and closely supervised baby dolphins (who have about a 1 in 3 chance of dying in their first year at the best of times) were merely incidental. Not that you have to go back a lot of generations before human infants were similarly likely to be expendable, another distinction I doubt the newspaper kept in mind.)

On the home front, we have a baby downy woodpecker who has (after some complaining) figured out how to eat from the bird feeder all by himself, another generation of baby rabbits (who are about to become irritating), and one of the young redtail hawks flew off our roof as I was looking out the bathroom window this morning. So, life continues. My invisible dusk-blooming choke vine birdhouse squash has finally deigned to produce a female flower, so it may begin to set seed, too. And we are an officially certified wildlife habitat, with a sign and everything, but I think I'll save that picture for its own post.

infant mortality

My weekend went well; we canoed, watched ospreys at a distance, and saw thousands of little snails (er, the earth variety...) clinging to reeds and saltmarsh grasses. There were also civil war history, ice cream, more mosquitoes than home, and the turtles went off beautifully, even if #23 needed a little help sorting out that it was supposed to go get in the river instead of digging a hole in the sand. (Admittedly, it hadn't had the opportunity to do either in quite some time.) Elsewhere, most of the people I hang out with at the Aquarium these days were holding a dying baby dolphin to keep her blow hole out of the water.

(the article is reasonably good, though they could have used some editing-- as opposed to the first article they ran when Maya's calf died, headlined "Baby Dolphin Found Dead in Pool." When asked what they were thinking, the editor is reputed to have said, "well, it's what we say when there's a body in the harbor," as if the difference between adult humans and closely supervised baby dolphins (who have about a 1 in 3 chance of dying in their first year at the best of times) were merely incidental. Not that you have to go back a lot of generations before human infants were similarly likely to be expendable, another distinction I doubt the newspaper kept in mind.)

On the home front, we have a baby downy woodpecker who has (after some complaining) figured out how to eat from the bird feeder all by himself, another generation of baby rabbits (who are about to become irritating), and one of the young redtail hawks flew off our roof as I was looking out the bathroom window this morning. So, life continues. My invisible dusk-blooming choke vine birdhouse squash has finally deigned to produce a female flower, so it may begin to set seed, too. And we are an officially certified wildlife habitat, with a sign and everything, but I think I'll save that picture for its own post.

Experimentally cross-posty from dreamwidth. Comments encouraged in either location.

last week's flowers & insect life (as promised, something a little more cheerful)

We're official! Yes, I did zip-tie this sign to the fence. But never mind that-- have some weird alien flowers!

( clicky for flowers & polinators, all of which my camera is strangely convinced are out of focus )

In slightly more disturbing news, grauwulf says the idiot neighbor claims to have dug up a cache of eggs out of his backyard last week sometime, and apparently he thought the appropriate thing to do with carefully buried presumably-reptile eggs was to take them inside and put them in his incubator. (Why does he even have an incubator??) Today, I caught one of the young redtails carrying off some of the gardening equipment he leaves lying all over his backyard, and I was uncharitably amused.

This week's pictures include black-eyed susans (state flower of MD, and not actually quite native here, though they're close enough to be beneficial), swamp milkweed, garden phlox, and how to sex flowers on the birdhouse gourd that's trying to eat the porch screen, but at the current rate of posting, you're unlikely to see those until next week at the earliest. Maybe I'll even post about something else before then! Crazy.

last week's flowers & insect life (as promised, something a little more cheerful)

We're official! Yes, I did zip-tie this sign to the fence. But never mind that-- have some weird alien flowers!

( clicky for flowers & polinators, all of which my camera is strangely convinced are out of focus )

In slightly more disturbing news, grauwulf says the idiot neighbor claims to have dug up a cache of eggs out of his backyard last week sometime, and apparently he thought the appropriate thing to do with carefully buried presumably-reptile eggs was to take them inside and put them in his incubator. (Why does he even have an incubator??) Today, I caught one of the young redtails carrying off some of the gardening equipment he leaves lying all over his backyard, and I was uncharitably amused.

This week's pictures include black-eyed susans (state flower of MD, and not actually quite native here, though they're close enough to be beneficial), swamp milkweed, garden phlox, and how to sex flowers on the birdhouse gourd that's trying to eat the porch screen, but at the current rate of posting, you're unlikely to see those until next week at the earliest. Maybe I'll even post about something else before then! Crazy.

Experimentally cross-posty from dreamwidth. Comments encouraged in either location.