scrubjayspeaks

The Great Backyard Bird Count is taking place this weekend. Learn how to participate, even if you're not much of a birder.

While I've heard about the GBBC in years past, I've never managed to participate before. I do play around with the Merlin bird identification app from Cornell Labs, though, and that counts as a method of reporting bird sightings for the count. Convenient!

This week, I've been reading Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie by Kate Shaw. Kate is the host of the Strange Animals Podcast, which I love, and I backed the Kickstarter for the book. The ebook is out now, so I've been reading it on my work breaks. I really enjoy it, and can hear Kate's voice in some of the little moments of humor in it.

At the same time, it can be a little depressing at times. The section on birds, in particular, so often had the same story arc: people encountered an interesting bird for the first time, shot it for a trophy and/or study, shot every other one they could find, people don't see this bird anymore. Conservation is such a recent phenomenon and such a fragile one. So it made me feel better to go outside to look for birds and report, however inexpertly, what I found.

Almost two years after I started befriending her, the local wandering cat is my very good Noise Cat. I still don't know who she belongs to, and I barely resist the urge to straight up steal her so nothing can hurt her. But she is, sadly, an outside cat and not mine. Still. She visits often and makes biscuits if my lap is available.

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Found a shiny on my perimeter walk this morning.

 

The color striations remind me of salmon sashimi. Now I crave sushi.