Birdbrain!

OK, it's Spring & it's time for a Pale Male & Lola update!

Our local celebrity redtails Pale Male & Lola began mating flights back in February - last year they were evicted (by an idiotic co-op board) from their posh digs on 5th Avenue, they had to rebuild their entire nest once the housing court of public opinion forced the co-op board to relent on their no-redtails-allowed policy, and although they had a clutch the eggs didn't hatch, probably just as good for the pair after all the stress & effort, but still sad - I'm hoping they have better luck this year! One of my blogroll links is to their home page - I keep an eye on it even when it's not nesting season for the hawks, 'cause Lincoln takes beautiful pictures year round (although I'm not sure what I think of this suing Paula Zahn for wrongful imprisonment thing, that's kind of a strange story when he started out saying yes, he took his protesting too far when he frightened her young son), so I've known - hadn't gotten around to an update though. Last week they made the front page of the NYTimes, and today, although I don't see a specific March update on the update page, the captions under today's picture indicate that Lincoln thinks they've got some eggs in there. I hope they hatch this year! Here's something I wrote after making a pilgrimage to go see 'em in person instead of just being a virtual hawkwatcher - that was cool, I'll have to try to work that in again this year & take some pictures of the scene!

I had another cool - amazingly cool - redtail story & picture from one of the Rustbucket paddling posse that I was going to post today but Blogger's picture thing is hiccupy & I got tired of wasting lunch hour fighting with it. Maybe tonight.

One more bird link & then back to work - Barbara, one of the other attendees at the Florida week, lives in Maine & is involved in the Biodiversity Research Institute - her husband's winter project was setting up an eagle cam! It really is fascinating, the range of things that sea kayakers do when they're not sea kayaking - we've got a pretty amazing assortment at the barge, but I'm really reminded of that when I go do a class where I meet a bunch of people - Barbara was not the only person who was involved in preserving wildlife at this symposium and I actually can't remember whether she was the one who at one point in her career had been caring for an eagle in her bathtub, or whether that was someone else & she'd only had a loon - just too many interesting people leading interesting lives to keep track of...anyways, neat website.

Great weekend, I've thrown up a few (a very few) pictures from a short hike around Lake Minnewaska (which is SO gorgeous you could take pretty shots with your eyes closed) over on Buzznet - you'll see they've changed their look completely but the navigation still works the same - the button that's the arrow key to move to the next picture is now white with 3 little black dots instead of blue w/three little white dots (oh, yeah & I think they're still working out the bugs on their revamp - pictures going away & coming back, things loading slowly & what have you, so if it's not working, just try back later. Really nice weekend, great company, much laughter & storytelling, and we had a gorgeous day for our hike -we did manage a little end-of-season snowball target practice, but some of us were in shirtsleeves while we did it!

End of lunch break post; I did finish the other thing I had to finish before I could post anymore, so I'll be getting back to the thing with the airplanes soon - that was just going to be a little more involved than I could get on my lunch hour. Plus I need something from the barge.

Oh yeah, two last quick items -

1. Kayakboy saw a harbor porpoise!

2. Kayakboy thought that was pretty darned cool & hopes his porpoise stays clear of Chevron's mess in the Arthur Kill. Hope they clean that up. Ugh.