Yeah…he’s been kinda sorta…well, let me think on the right word…been a slacker, yeah, that’s it.
Anyways…3 weeks with no post but then hey, nothing much has been happening.
Connie finished preparing for and sang in the first two of her concerts of the Lord Nelson Mass…which although it’s named after Horatio Nelson has nothing to do with him other then it was published around the time of his death. It was a pretty good concert…and she sang it again a couple days later. But then the third performance was on Friday evening over on Sanibel Island and she didn’t feel well so she stayed home…which was fine with Neil as he wasn’t really looking forward to battling his way through rush hour traffic and paying the 6 bucks toll for the bridge over there. So they stayed home and had some linguini with cheese, pecans, and pine nuts instead and all was good. She was bummed that she didn’t get to sing it the third time…but happy to stay home since she was not feeling well that day.
We went to the Elks for Valentine’s Day dinner…had excellent steaks and baked taters and some wine.
They drove up to Orlando for their TSA Global Entry interview…that designation lets you get into a different sorta slightly better security line. Drove up…did the interview and got approved, and drove back home.
And that’s about it for the home front for the time since my last post.
One interesting thing of note…I’m sure that almost everybody that reads this blog has been to at least one concert where string instruments were featured or at the very least has actually seen a violin. And you’ll likely remember that they’re pretty much universally a brownish color based on staining of the wood that makes up the body. Well…we sen one at her concert that we’ve never seen before. I’m sorry about the lousy photo below…but Neil took it from his seat in row 9 or 10 with his iPhone 15 Pro Max and while it’s good camera, this was zoomed in pretty far. The one in question is on the left seat in the photo and the more traditional wood violin (actually it’s a viola which is sort of like an alto violin) on the right chair.
He couldn’t really decide what it was…but as best as he can figure out it looks like it is made out of carbon fiber instead of wood…and he’s (a) never heard of this being done and (b) even if it is done he’s amazed that a professional musician playing in a professional orchestra would have it instead of the more traditional instrument. Anyways…he thought it was pretty unusual and got me a shot to post here.
Lent started…which means we can’t eat meat (defined as warm blooded animals or fowl) for the season…and we’re pretty much fine with that. We like seafood anyway so it’s really not a hardship for us at all. Back in the day when this requirement was first dreamed up by the Catholic Church…not eating meat meant fish…and fish meant in those days dried fish, which Neil can tell you is pretty unappetizing. However…here in the 21st century…we have shrimp, crab, halibut, oysters, and many other quite tasty non meat alternatives so we just go with those. Interestingly enough…there’s one animal that’s been officially defined by the Vatican as being a fish from back in 1784. Since the PRC (People’s Republic of Californiastan) classified bees as fish back in 2023 I guess it’s not the first time strange things have happened.
There’s this rodent called a capybara…it’s a giant rodent sort of like a nutria or beaver that lives (mostly) in South America. Back when…the catholics in that continent petition the pope and actually got it approved as a ‘fish’ since it lives in the water. We’ve never eaten one…but Ima guessing it tastes like chicken. Here’s a picture of one…I gotta admit it’s the strangest fish I ever saw since it’s got fur rather than scales. I dunno…whaddya think?
You can also eat beavers on Friday during Lent…but we don’t have any of those here in FL to try so we’ll just stick to shrimp and lobster and calamari I guess.
OK, as I noted in a previous post (well, at least I thought I did but reviewing previous posts…apparently not…but I digress) Nikon came out with version 2.0 of the firmware for Neil’s Z8 body and a month or so earlier came out with version 4.1.0 for the Z9. He dutifully upgraded to these and while I won’t bore you with all of the goodies contained therein…there are a couple of really neat autofocus improvements…one is the addition of bird recognition and particularly bird eye recognition as a subject to be focused on and the Z8 has a mode to more rapidly shift between a selected group of autofocus options. The Z9 doesn’t have the latter yet but does have the former and I’m sure the latter will come along with the next update out of the Z9 team.
These new options will make his upcoming trip to Tanzania late next month easier to get focus on the animals he’ll see and required some rejiggering of the functions assigned to the various buttons on his bodies. And since he’s not really all that good at remembering two different sets of ‘what do the buttons do’…he reprogrammed both the Z8 ad the Z9 to be as consistent as he could get them. And since that was a bunch of new stuff…he needed to go and check out whether he liked the new changes or where they needed re-rejiggering.
So…last week he went up to Fort DeSoto State Park near St Pete to check things out. And long story short…he likes the new configurations just fine.
But the good news is that he came home with about 1200 frames of assorted birds and I’ve whittled them down to 20ish to post for ya here. The biggest reason for DeSoto is the it’s the prime spot in the area for Reddish Egrets…and they have about the nicest mating plumage of any of the birds down here in addition to the coolest hunting technique…this usually involve them raising their wings and making a sort of shade. I’m not sure whether this is to entice the fish into the shade or to make it easier to see past the reflections on the surface…but they’re the only bird that we know of that uses this technique. So…here are some photos, and there’s a couple of interesting sequences and a relatively rare species down here as well.
Reddish Egret. Note the red hue on the neck and now that it’s breeding season they also get pink on the bill. Reddish’s are about the same size as a Great Blue Heron…they’re about 30 inches tall. There is also a slightly different version known as the White Morph Reddish Egret which is totally white (as are the juveniles) but retains the black legs and pink and black bill…the White Morph has been seen infrequently at DeSoto but Neil hasn’t spotted one yet. The pink in the bill gets a lot more pronounced later in the breeding season…gotta attract the ladies ya know.
Seagull.
He couldn’t decide what this shore bird is…best guess is a Red Knot but it’s hard to really be sure.
Mottled Duck…he was hanging out in the tidal pool with the Reddish.
Here is a quick sequence of the reddish striking and eating a fish…probably 2-3 seconds between strike and swallow. Fortunately…20 frames per second let him pick the best ones from the sequence for you…and you can see the unique feeding behavior in the first shot though they close their wings down as they strike.
A few more shots…he saw two individuals of the species but the second was a juvenile and didn’t hang around long.
He really liked this one since you can see the light through the wings as it landed. The juvenile buzzed it and this one went over to the beach in the background then flew back out to feed again once the juvenile left.
And another successful catch.
He then headed off to where the owls were nesting but on the way spotted this Osprey with breakfast up on a power pole.
He got over to the area near the boat ramp and ferry landing where one of his forum buddies who lives in the area told him about the nesting Great Horned Owls…but before he got to the base of their tree he spotted another pair of Osprey in some sort of tussle. While it wasn’t clear…he thinks that the one with the fish was trying to drive the other one off of a nesting area so that it could take over. Ospreys have particularly bad nest building skills and thus a lot of nesting platforms have been put in place for them and I guess they’re prime spots that latecomers want to steal. Again…this was a whole sequence that took about 20 seconds or so…and he missed the original approach of the intruder who practically hit the original occupant as it passed…and it never let go of the fish in its talons.
And naturally the original owner did its best to drive off the intruder and returned to the nest in 10 seconds or less…but he missed focus on the landing despite the autofocus in the camera so no shot of that for you.
Just a few feet further down the parking lot he came to the nest of the Great Horned Owls. There are two owlets in the nest, they’re about 50 days or so old I guess here so basically full grown except all of their flight feathers haven’t come in and they haven’t fledged yet (i.e., that is taken their first flight). Here are two versions of the same shot…he upscaled the second one but in reality the range to the nest was probably 40 feet so upscaling didn’t really improve the results. However…he wanted to post both and see if you the readers can spot any differences in sharpness.
All in all…a good day was had and he and Connie have a trip early next month for a quick weekend trip to Titusville for Black Point Wildlife Drive, the St. Augustine Alligator Farm and a Saint Séans Organ Symphony 3 concert…they’re really looking forward to that.
Here are a couple of shots from the pond out back over the last 3 weeks.
Osprey with breakfast.
Little Blue Heron in breeding colors…the red on the neck is about as fancy as they get.
And one of our resident GBH (Great Blue Heron)
Interesting things found on the net.
We see a lot of media rubbish these days about chemicals in our food and how evil corporations are poisoning us…and how we should eat ‘natural’ foods instead. Well…here’s a look at what it actually in one of those natural foods, the standard banana. Seems like it’s got a whole lot of chemicals in it as well.
And another thing you might believe from the news…that climate change and ice melting is a new phenomenon and is caused 100% entirely by the actions of people…but maybe not so much. As you can see
here…a recent study published by the University of Cambridge shows that about 8,000 years ago, near the *end* of the last Ice Age…there was a serious melting of the ice sheet in Antarctica resulting in it’s thickness thinning by 450 meters (or 1400+ feet) in a 200 year period. Now I’m not going to claim that human activity has nothing to do with our current warming trend…but this one happened well before there were many humans in existence and it just might be that the climate warriors are just a little overzealous in their claims.
And once again…I really have to wonder about math nerds…because (a) who would actually try and figure this out and (b) it doesn’t have any actual meaning whatsoever.
The string of digits ‘79873884′ occurs 4 times in the first 200 millions digits of π, but the second time it does, it occurs starting exactly at position 79873884, counting from the first digit after the decimal point.
Ok…so what.
In other math nerdery…the letter ‘a’ does not appear in any number as spelled out until we get to the spelling of 1,000…and the letter ‘b’ does not appear until we get to the spelling of a billion. While these statements are inarguably correct…they’re again completely meaningless in the first place and why in the world would somebody sit down to figure things like this out. Math people need to get a life.
And in the ultimate math nerdery (for today at least)…and again I’m not sure why this is important for any reason to anybody…our long national nightmare is over and math people have finally figured out the equation to describe the shape of…you guessed it (or more likely you didn’t guess it)…a bird’s egg. A couple of researchers at Kent University in the UK…Darren Griffin (Professor of Genetics) and Dr. Michael Romanov (Visiting Researcher)…have (their words) found the universal formula for the shape of a bird’s egg and this will make widespread biological and technical applications possible. This new universal mathematical formula for egg shape is based on four parameters: egg length, maximum breadth, shift of the vertical axis, and the diameter at one quarter of the egg length.
Yeah…so?
And about the US military…another fun fact.
The US Air Force is the world’s largest air force.
The US navy is the second world’s largest air force.
The US navy has also its own army which in turn has its own air force. The US Marine Corps Aviation is the world’s fifth largest air force.
Another thing one sees in the news a lot…especially as a few people have been killed by sharks recently. One might think that sharks are a significant contributor to human fatalities. Well…outside of war…here’s a diagram of which animals kill the most humans.
Probably not something you expected. Don’t worry though…although malaria is present in some parts of Tanzania (where Neil is going) and in some parts of Costa Rica (where they’re both going in the summer)…it’s not prevalent in either of the areas they’ll be in. Nonetheless…Neil is taking prophylactic drugs while he’s in Africa to ward off any potential bad stuff…and Connie verified that the CDC is correct a the mayor problem parasite in Tanzania is P. falciparum…but the drugs he will take from 2 days before to 7 days afterward will prevent any infection from those nasty li’l buggers.
And finally…in the latest instance of political correctness run amuck…the movie Mary Poppins has been reclassified in rating in the UK…from U to PG. This is because of…according to
this article…it contains ‘discriminatory language’. The particular offending language is the word hottentots which is a slang term for the original inhabitants of South Africa. Now back in the 60s when the movie was filmed this wasn’t a bad word but it is today so political correctness demands that we reclassify the movie.
I’m really tired of both the right and left in the 2020s trying to label behavior, language, customs, and normal social things from decades to centuries ago by today’s standards. Yes…today some terms are either actually derogatory or discriminatory or at least perceived by some groups as such…but it’s ludicrous to impose the standards of today on things that happened long ago. Those things from long ago should be judged of course…but they should be judged by the standards of the time, not by today’s standards. Nuts I tellya.
Cyas.