Things continue to be pretty normal ‘round here…except that it’s hot and in the high 80s to low 90s every day as we get into summer. That means that Neil changed his bike riding routine and is trying to get out earlier. We set the alarm for 0530 on bike days…we’re usually awake by then anyway…and Connie makes coffee around 0700 and he tries to head out by 0830. It’s still warm and humid then but it isn’t nearly as bad as if he goes out at 1000 or 1030.

Other than that…not really much is new. We are keeping the A/C on almost all the time but are able to open up for a few hours about half the days…if it’s nice Connie opens up when she gets up to make coffee and we close up when it gets to be time…sometimes as late as 1400 depending on weather and breezes.

Neil’s new Nikon Z7II body came in on Sunday…it was originally supposed to get here on Monday but FedEx came a day early…and that delivery makes the whole pile of ‘useless stuff’ over on the couch suddenly ‘useful’. He spent a couple hours configuring all the various settings to his desires yesterday afternoon and got a few test shots that I will add below. There’s gonna be a bit of a learning curve on the new body as the autofocus modes and areas are completely different from his DSLR that he used before…he’s been playing with Connie’s Z50 to start to get used to those but his new one has even more modes than her entry level Z50 does.

He also ordered himself another solid state drive for the iMac back in the office that he does most of his processing on…he wants to move his Lightroom catalog off of the spinning hard drive RAID array it currently lives on and onto a solid state drive for speed purposes. He did an experiment yesterday and did a couple test imports…starting with a 60GB set of files on a camera memory card he started an import into the catalog on the RAID…he stopped it after 15+ minutes and it was only about 20% complete. He then copied the catalog over to the internal SSD and repeated the import…it stopped itself after 12 minutes because the drive in the iMac was full but it did fully import 80% of the 60GB in that time. So…he ordered himself a 2 TB external SSD that will hook up to the fast Thunderbolt 3 port on the back of the computer and will move booting, applications, and Lightroom to that drive instead. 

Our local eaglets have both fledged the nest and are flying around doing their juvenile eagle thing…Harriet and M15 are presumably taking them on hunting trips to start to teach them how to feed themselves. We’ve all seen the photos of eagles snatching fish out of rivers or lakes but that’s an adult skill and takes them a year or two to perfect…in the meantime the juveniles…like adult eagles…will both eat just about anything dead or alive or will gladly steal fish from ospreys. Even adult eagles mostly are scavengers rather than hunters…at least in urban and suburban areas.

Here’s a shot of E17 and E18…no idea on their sex at this point. I don’t know which is which but the close one appears to be female since it’s a bit larger…although that could just be the perspective caused by the relatively close video camera on the nest. They are essentially full grown at this point to adult size and will learn to hunt and each for themselves over the next few months before heading off to live alone until they’re 4 years or so old and reach sexual maturity when they will look for a mate for life and start raising their own eaglets.

Here are some shots he’s gotten the past week or so…the beginning ones were taken with Connie’s Z50 and his bird lens as he started work on getting familiar with the whole mirrorless way of doing business.

This is what the news called the “pink moon” earlier this month…it’s not actually pink but it’s also called a super-moon…because it’s bigger than normal full moons are. That’s obviously because the close approach of the moon over the year varies since it’s orbit is slightly elliptical varying in close approach by about 14,000 kilometers or 8,680 miles…whenever the closer distance coincides with a full moon you get the super-moon.

Ragnar’s back.

And our friendly neighborhood non-skittish Great Blue Heron. You can see his breeding plumage in the first couple…the jaunty little feather off the back of his head.

The ones above were taken right outside our lanai…Neil actually had to back away from him for the full body shot as he was pretty close for the bird lens but that’s the one he had at the moment. Shortly after that he took off to the other side of the pond and Neil got a nice flight sequence…one good thing about the Z software is that it does a better job of latching onto and holding focus on the bird.

And a couple that he got yesterday with his new Z7II and the bird lens…these aren’t quite as good as they should be photographically as they were shot in JPEG instead of his normal RAW image mode (operator error on his part in doing the setup…it’s fixed now) so lighting and processing aren’t really up to snuff. The AF did really nail the focus on the osprey as it turned over our pond in the first one.

Interesting things found on the net.

Cyas.