These two are no longer with us.
When Spouse and I first met, she was the new human to a pair of kittens, brothers who had been born in a neighbor's woodpile to a pair of feral cats whom the neighbor was feeding. A few years later, the neighbor passed, at which point we assumed responsibility for Mom and Dad Cat as well. There was no way they would be indoor cats, so they lived in the back yard, sharing their food and water with the Cyanocittae.
Mom Cat (lower left in the photo), by far the more feral of the pair, disappeared in the winter of 2017, but returned in 2018 for a few months before disappearing for good (I recall that when she returned, she did so triumphantly, carrying most of a hot dog that had clearly been on someone's grill not many minutes earlier). Dad Cat remained, sitting at the edge of the back porch looking off into the trees wistfully. He moved to the Oregon Coast with us in 2019, where he lived out his days looking wistfully at a different stand of trees, sharing his food with a different family of Cyanocittae.
[#]CatsOfMastodon #ThrowbackThursday
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[#]pnw #oregon #SilentSunday #Mosstodon
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Wondering if I should temporarily reactivate my FB account to (a) delete old posts and (b) post a brief message to tell people where I went.
Open to suggestions.
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I'd like to share the present I got this year. The book is fun: single-page informational blurbs about birds and bird behavior, but I love love love Emily Poole's illustrations that accompany each story.
[#]birds #BirdsOfMastodon #books #pnw
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A few weeks ago, I was treated to the spectacle of a small-town elementary school holiday concert. At one point, all the K-3rd graders assembled on the stage for what was billed as a body percussion performance of the Russian Dance from the Nutcracker. This amounted to about 120 kids between the ages of 5 and 9, clapping, snapping, and gesturing in a very rough sketch of synchronization, EXCEPT…
Except for the one boy, in the exact center of the front row. He wore a gray shirt, a gray vest, and gray pants tucked into a tall pair of Xtratuf deck boots (this is coastal Oregon after all). Above all this was a festive red bow tie; above that was the slicked-back hair, the furrowed brow, the impassive expression of a six-year-old Boris Karloff. As everyone moved all around him, he stood absolutely still, one solitary fixed point in a swaying, stomping, fidgeting universe, glancing sometimes left, sometimes right, sometimes out at the audience, always with the absolute certainty that the world had gone mad.
[#]Oregon #PNW #SmallTownHijinks
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Artist: I like to describe my work as occupying the space between Edward Gorey and Edvard Munch.
Critic: So… Edward Monkey?
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After the rest of the fall colors have faded, the larch steps up.
[#]PNW #Oregon
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Remembered this photo as I was pulling photos off the memory card. I got used to juncos out on the deck railing, and one day last week I noticed that one of them was larger than the rest.
After putting my glasses on, I realized my hunky junco was actually a towhee. #BirdsOfMastodon #birds #oregon #pnw
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I was looking forward to sleeping in today, but realized that I had my usual 6am Thursday therapy appointment (my therapist, for reasons, is 5 time zones and almost 80 degrees of latitude away, in a country where Thanksgiving isn't a thing). So, being awake afterward with nothing to do, I went for a bit of a ride. Nothing too deep into the woods—because it's still elk season for another day and a half—but still a bit off the main road.
I'm glad I did. It wasn't a spectacular ride, but it was good to get out, as a complement to regular therapy. I did get off a few times to take photos, which I don't ordinarily do. Now it's off to be in a room with other people. #motorcycle #oregon #pnw
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[#]Caturday in the #PacificNorthWet
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Gold-crowned kinglet on a grape vine.
[#]birds #ilforddelta100 #distractodon
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I found this gold-crowned kinglet early one morning in Port Angeles, WA. I was walking back to my motel room from the Vancouver Island ferry terminal—which I'd be getting on with my motorcycle in an hour or so—and saw a (presumably) stray cat with a guilty expression. The kinglet was between me and the cat, next to a big shop window. I carried him a block back to the motel and let him recuperate on my bike's handlebar while I got the bike ready for the ferry.
[#]birds #distractodon
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Little bird, big voice. Based on the photos around it, I took this at the Tualatin River NWR in 2009.
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I gave my mother a print of this photo years ago; she got it framed, and hung it rotated 90 degrees so the bird was rightside-up.
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[#]Voted. From the comfort of my dining room table, at my leisure, surrounded by loved ones and useful, relevant information.
Now, in a total Tim Walz move, I'm gonna go change the oil and air filter on the #motorcycle.
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Apologies for the bad photos. Yesterday, I was at a park about 10 miles from my house when I noticed a #crow with some white feathers. This evening I was able to make it back there around sunset with my camera. It only took me a few minutes to find them again, on the far edge of a cluster of about fifty crows, all down in the grass for their evening nibble. I was a little too eager to get close, but now I know where this one lives.
[#]BirdsOfMastodon #corvids #pnw
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Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me…
[#]Caturday
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[#]Caturday camouflage
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In other unnecessarily possessive bird news, a Townsend's Warbler held still long enough for a couple of shots while I was completing my annual Fraud, Waste, and Abuse training.
Beyond seeing a moderately unusual bird, it was gratifying to learn that Impostor Syndrome is not covered under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid's definition of Fraud. Or Waste.
[#]birds #BirdsOfMastodon
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I guess the question I get asked the most, aside from "Will you get me a popsicle/root beer float/peanut butter & jelly/pony?" is "Which bird would you expect to be the first to really accessorize?"
And, yeah, the answer is always the Steller's Jays. Here we see Buzzy, from the spruce tree next to the big spruce tree, rocking the Genuine Spruce Needle Inquisitive Eyebrow from the Chaos Rooster Exclusive Fall Collection.
[#]Birds #BirdsOfMastodon #Corvid #Cyanocitta #ChaosRooster
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text/gemini
