Rain Gryphon

As I noted earlier, we had a bit of a storm Wednesday afternoon.


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Here, you can see my nice new red trash barrel, with its exposure to imminent destruction by traffic well illustrated.

The limb that fell off the Ash tree was one where the Starlings have nested for years.

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You can see the sad little hole which is all that's left of their home. Fortunately, all of the babies were gone, and nobody got hurt, but it's still sad. I've watched babies coming out of that hole many times.

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So, early Thursday morning, we had another storm, with rather more-widespread destruction. This time a big ol' branch from one of the maples fell off.

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Again, the Red Barrel has survived a near-miss!


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From the back, the grey car and the red barrel are almost entirely obscured. The blue car initially appeared to be untouched, but such was Not the Case!


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As I sawed up and hauled away the branches, I found... that my side mirror was smash-ed! (say it in a Dexter's Laboratory voice).

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As well as the top of the frame on the driver's side.


I'm inclined to accept this as a sign from the Fates that they're not gunning for me personally - just busting up my stuff a bit. I'm astonished that no glass was broken in the blue car, and (so far as I'm able to tell) the weather sealing around the doors stills seals. Both doors open just fine, and the damage to the side mirror looks to me as though it can be glued. The wires are still in place, and the mirror motors work. It hit just absolutely perfectly, on the strongest part of the frame, where the door pillar, shocks, and tires took the load vertically. A few inches inboard, and it would have caved in the roof, and busted all or most of the glass. A few inches the other way would probably have damaged the grey car rather severely, as well as busted out the driver's side glass from the blue car. I'll take this. No real functional damage inflicted, plus it makes the blue car look rather rakish and disreputable. :)

Addendum: The constant rain and cool weather get tiresome, but on the good side, Indiana will have record crops this year. You'd be pardoned for reading the MSM and accepting that America is all burned up and dry, since that story is constantly pushed. In the Midwest, it is an absolute jungle. Such intense greens, everywhere you look!


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The storm knocked these pears off the crumbly little Pear Tree. They're not entirely ripe, but will get that way soon, if stored in paper bags. I'm not yet sure what I'll do with all of these.

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The big purple glass bowl is more than halfway filled with tomatoes! Lots of the weird-looking yellow teardrop ones too. Apparently the heat and rain were just right, as we had a ton of them just come ripe all at once.

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A blossom of Canadian thistle. It's classed as a noxious weed, but still I think it's lovely to look at.

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Cropduster dude came around, apparently spraying for bugs. I thought at first that it was something to do with the air show planned for Saturday, but he was just spraying.

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A lovely jade-coloured chrysalis. I *think* it's going to be a Monarch butterfly. We'll find out for sure in a few days.

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Some sort of little berries. These are growing everywhere this year. In the background is a solitary yew berry.

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So, summer dwindles to its close. In many respects, it was a rotten summer. I didn't get to attend a single fair, not even the State Fairs. No fur cons, no Egg Festival Parade, and I even had to miss the Indianapolis Five Hundred :P

On the good side, though, I saw vast amounts of baby birds, and indirectly helped their parents to raise them. There are still butterflies, and weird and beautiful plants to enjoy. I had a baby Raccoon come in the yard. And the lunatic in the biplane blasting past 25 feet over my head :)

And there's a few weeks left yet.

Got the rest of the container tomatoes planted, along with bell peppers (also container), plus cabbages (in the ground). There's a really, really, basic selection of vegetable starts at the stores. Nothing like the varieties that were available last year.

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This is my new, temporary friend, Cheepy McSparrowface. She's been out of the nestbox (Box B) for about five minutes at this point, and is a bit overwhelmed by it all. She let me walk up to her and pick her up, then perched on my hand for a bit, before deciding that perhaps that wasn't a wise course of action. I left her in the Lilac bush with her sibs.



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Here you can see how big she is. Even for a House Sparrow, she's a bit petit. A big grown-up girl with all of her feathers out of the sheathes, though.

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Today at the grocery store, there was a Swallow (a Barn Swallow?) who had a nest mounted on some small fixture about two feet above, and a foot or so to the right of the entrance. She was going about her business tending a nest full of chicks, and just completely ignoring the humans passing below her. I think, quite honestly, of everyone there, I was the only one who noticed. People are just oblivious sometimes.

At the garden store, and at the gas station, there were House Sparrows tending nests built in hollow steel canopy members. The babies were just cheeping up a storm, with the adults running back and forth with food. They're all around us!

Locust shells on my front yard maple tree, with yellow lichen. Some people insist on calling them "cicadas", but these are the same people who call buffalo "bison".

I grew up in southern Indiana, and from like 1970 through 1976 or so, we had a locust swarm every summer. After the first few years, they became just part of the background of summer, and nothing special. At the beginning, though, they were amazing! I remember driving out to the country with my aunt and uncle and mother and grandmother, and finding a tree just covered with them, and all the adults were talking about the last time this happened. Seeing them was like some strange link to a time before I was born.

If you live in a place that doesn't have them, or have never seen them, the noise they make is incedible! It's this loud, high-pitched, near-mechanical sound that just fills the world, rising and falling as these millions of little bugs all sing in chorus. In a swarm year, the trees are just covered with the empty shells. The bugs crawl up out of the ground (leaving hundreds of neat round holes), cling to the tree, and the winged adult hatches out of the case, leaving the husk behind. If you look closely, you can see that the shells still have the hollow cases for the sensory hairs attached.



One summer, for whatever reason, it became the thing to do to collect the empty shells, fill them with soap bubble solution, them smash them on your friends.

After '76, they tapered off the next summer, and then were gone. Summer afternoons seemed uncannily quiet.

Five-coloured peppers. These are tiny hot peppers that I grew indoors last summer in a pot. They go through five colours as the fruits ripen - green, white, yellow, purple, and finally bright red. You can actually use them in cooking, but they don't have much flavour at all - they're just hot.

A little green frog uses his suction cup toes to climb my garage door. The colours look kinda off because the light source is a high-pressure mercury lamp in the security light, and I did my colour balance afterward in GiMP, as I feared he'd go away if I took the time to reset my camera's white balance. I thik he's cool-looking enough to post anyway.

Sunday, at the Speedway. NASCAR is dying. It was eerie, and evocative, seeing all the Speedway's equipment deployed (track dryers, track cleaners, every kind of safety device imaginable - the Speedway has more revenue and deployable equipment than many Third World countries), all the cars turning out, the announcer doing his best to talk things up, but... just empty stands. Being of a rather maudlin disposition, I couldn't help but think of the final Australian Grand Prix from "On the Beach".

I kind of suspected it would be like this. When you watch on TV anymore, they never show grandstand shots. NASCAR laid off about half of their employees already. They're caught in a trap. They made the decision back in the 80s to become a TV sport. To make the sport exciting for an audience who have never been, and will probably never go, to an actual race track, they needed to keep the outcome in doubt until after the last commercial break. That led to silly game-show style rules to make sure that lap advantages built by skill and strategy over the course of a long race are stripped away by repeated restarts so that the race is decided on the final lap. Now they're caught in the trap of being dependent on the TV revenue stream that's killing their sport. The reckoning took a generation, but now it's here.

To their credit, they're trying to slowly dig out from under this, and return to sane rules. It may be too late, and they may be trying to fix things too slowly. Sunday was a great race, but... Nobody came to watch. NASCAR has spent much of the summer trying to play up nostalgia, and build a sense that today is built on the past, which it is, but not in a good way. When you're trying to make people appreciate what they have, it's not good tactics to remind them of how much they've lost. Sunday before the race, they kept showing past races on the Jumbotron. You couldn't help but notice the packed stands in the old videos.

For the past 20 years, at least, the Speedway has provided a shuttle service from the airport to the track and back for all of their races. This Sunday they didn't offer it. Mom and I drove to the track, past vast empty parking fields that were packed full in the old days. We parked about a half mile from the north end, starting to become nervous as to whether there would be closer parking. We needn't have worried. We could literally have parked across the street from Gate 6 (just north of the start/finish line). Mom's hip is still not fixed, so we brought along the wheel chair, and I pushed her, which I found oddly enjoyable. I meditated on being a Horse in Victorian London while I marched along. I kept a pretty stout pace too - I was passing lots of people who were walking with no load, both in and out. It ended up being probably about a mile and a half altogether each way (we sit at the head of the first turn), and I was blowing and slightly sweaty, but still enjoying myself. I'm in better shape than I've been for years now.

The race was sponsored by Big Machine Vodka, which sounds to me like a most unpromising name for a vodka, or really any liquor, or for that matter anything at all that one intends to eat or drink. Italian Futurists would probably differ. In addition to the "sponsored by" line, in the advertising and announcements the statement "powered by Georgia/Florida State Line*" is always immediately appended. Obviously, in a practical sense, this means that they're the secondary sponsor, but what idea is intended to be conveyed by "powered by" in this context remains a mystery to me, other than that we're meant to perceive them as all dynamic and stuff. A "powered by" sponsor seems to be de riguer for a major sporting event anymore.


* A country music band.

Edit: As you can kinda tell from the picture (cell phone), it's more the older fans who are left. We keep coming not so much for what's left, but for what once was.

Siberian Black Tomatoes! Being from Siberia, they have a short growing season, and are producing nicely already, even though I planted them late (end of May). I bought them on impulse, mainly for the novelty value, but they're an extremely flavourful, low-acid tomato, if a bit on the smallish side. I'm well-pleased, and will plant more (and earlier) next year. The variety is "Black Prince", from Bonnie.

They actually look more brown than black, I think. Sort of a brickish colour. Wonderful salad tomatoes!



I did a poor job of planting these, too. They're in open shade about half the day, and crowded too closely together. I think if I let them have more sunlight and space next year, they'll do even better. I could have left this one to ripen a day longer, I think. Still a tiny bit unripe in the very top quarter inch or so of the core.

D box babies today. They've grown a lot. Eyes are open, and their feathers just beginning to emerge from the quills. Young, alert little birds now, and before much longer they'll be starting to exercise their wings, and begin to be interested in what's outside that entrance hole. Three is all there were, plus the egg that ddn't hatch.




I removed the egg from the nest, but needn't have worried about it. It had a very small crack in the shell, and was dried out and hollow. It's stuck to nesting material here. Not sure what happened to it, but the shell seems of a reasonable thickness. I may sprinkle some limestone powder in the seed tube, just in case.

I think there's a hen sitting eggs in the A box now. I didn't check for fear of scaring her off the nest.

A cool, drizzly day today. Everyone hit the feeders pretty heavily, as that was their best chance of getting a meal on a day like this, especially if they didn't want to be out for hours in the rain.


The tube feeder is encrusted with Sparrows! There's one on every perch, and about another ten or so out of sight on the ground, snapping up what's dropped. I love how they cooperate on stuff like that.


A Red-Bellied Woodpecker cock eating from the seed tube. I think he's after the sunflower seeds, which the Sparrows don't seem to care for anyway. He has to be uncomfortable like that, but it's evidently worth it for the reward.


Baby Downy Woodpecker, just out of the nest for a day or two, explores the back yard with his dad. The juvenile is a male - you can tell by the red crest growing in. Interestingly, while you see the red flash on the back of the adult's head, the red feathers actually grow on top, as you see here. As he grows and his display feathers get longer, they sweep back, and black feathers sweep backward to cover them.


Dad demonstrates how to eat cake from the feeder, as junior watches.


The baby doesn't quite make the connection yet. Dad patiently feeds him bird cake. This is the same male, I'm just about certain, who back in April chased away the hen that was interested in him when she got too close to his food. https://rain-gryphon.dreamwidth.org/79252.html A few months made quite a difference.


A Chipmunk raids the cake feeder, when none of the birds are using it. I'm kind of surprised. That's a dried mealworm cake. I'd not have thought that to a Chipmunk's taste.


Chipmunk cheeks! On her way back home, to get out of the rain and enjoy her dinner.

Dusk now, and the tube feeder is empty, and the bird cake gone. I filled both feeders last night, and will do so again tonight, it seems.