Called my mom and we didn’t talk long because my niece (not the one she lives with) answered the phone while waiting for Mom to come to it and explained that she and I think she said her sister were whisking her off for dinner with them. A whirl of happy to hear from you’s and they were off.

We should all be so lucky at 94. Made my day. And it was great to hear from my own kids. Hope you all had a good Mother’s Day, too, whether you are one or have one.

Just for fun, here’s video of a peregrine chick in its first attempt at climbing out of the nest box.

Banding day is Tuesday, based on the hatching date of the older three. It’s supposed to be before they start being able to wander out of the box so that they don’t scare right off the low edge of the runway when this big human suddenly rappels down from the roof while the parents throw a fit.

But this big eyas, and the one that copied it a few minutes later, didn’t read the memo.

Personally, my guess is that they’re going to declare it three females and that the one that hatched two days after the others is also smaller because he’s a male. But we’ll see.

The peregrines: the fourth egg hatched, two days after its siblings. It’s clearly a female because it’s almost as big as the others and it gets its beak right in there begging for food.

Monty brought in a meal without getting enough feathers off it first. Hartley harrumphed, grabbed it from him, did a how-it’s-done and then fed the kids herself.

The next time, Monty was determined and the food was prepared.

And so the cam crew managed to get this very unusual shot.

(Forgot to post this last night.) We went off to Oakland for the afternoon and when we came back, three of the four peregrine eggs had hatched!

If you watch this, that baby bird is amazing. A few hours old, not even at the dried white fluff stage yet and already it’s moving around towards where Momma is after being accidentally scooted out of the way while she was paying attention to the firstling. The video was taken just before the third made it out.

Given how bird flu has wiped out most of the peregrines in the greater Bay Area and left nests birdless, to see healthy parents and three living chicks so far feels so good.

Re today’s protests: the initial numbers are three and a half million people participating. The day before Easter, with families with so many other things to do, but they still did.

A sudden guffaw at the dinner table.

What??

I just remembered what kept me awake last night: can raccoons bend their tails over their heads like squirrels? They can’t, right? But why not, or why would they. Wouldn’t they want all that fluff keeping them warm in winter when they’re asleep?

Off to Dr. Google. The AI summary that is the first thing that pops up these days (it used to be Wikipedia with Google supporting it and should still be if you ask me, but anyway) said that squirrels use their tails to control their falls and raccoons don’t fall so they don’t need it so no they can’t.

Remove the squirrels from the question and the AI said they could. They just often don’t.

Alright, let’s try to find the info where those are plagiarizing from and maybe we can get the real story.

(Too many minutes later) Or maybe not. Still: clearly, it’s not really a thing for them.

Oh look. Calvin Coolidge got sent a raccoon for Thanksgiving dinner (say what?!) and wound up naming it Rebecca and turning it into a pet.

Can you just see that trash panda roaming the White House. Wait till it finds the kitchen.

Although, they do have a high degree of intelligence. You wouldn’t catch one of them, say, *cough* cutting off the lunchtime food source of their young in rural areas.

(Spent a lot of time today counting stitches in patterns and mind’s-eye patterns and doing math and finding there just won’t be room for every detail I want to put in. Richard said, Well then you have to cut half out.

Not half. And the raccoon stays. I just have to knit it first.)

She turned into a parking lot driveway while I was going, No, the road is right there! (Up ahead.)

Her: Did you see the turkeys?

Me: What turkeys?

She pulled the car around to where I could see, for the first time I can ever remember, wild turkeys. Right up close. One took a step towards my camera and turned his head: Did you get my good side?

The San Jose City Hall peregrines had their first egg today. During this bird flu, that is more than the usual cause for celebration.

Two years ago, the male was a second-year floater filling in for the original male just before laying started. Whether he contributed any genes to that one egg or not, we don’t know. He certainly tried. But there was no second egg. (The next year he was fully an adult and there were four, a more normal number.)

Juvenile markings and all, he was so excited at the sight of that thing. He’d never done this before but he was all in and he immediately went and hunted small prey for it so the pieces would be small enough to swallow easily–and, here’s the video, then tried to feed the egg.

Now it’s enthusiasm plus experience. As soon as his mate got up he was right there to get a good look. By the end of the week we should have a full nest and the brooding should begin.

Every step of the way is a victory.

(Former cam crew volunteer here.)

Well hello! Are you still a baby? Must be that time of year again.

Cute little thing. Finally managed to find the one yard that didn’t have a dog to bark at it–I’d been wondering what critter their voices had been chasing around the last week or so.

On a different note, bird flu has decimated the peregrine population: they’re talking about DDT-era levels in some parts. The Berkeley Campanile Tower birds are gone, seven Bay Area nests out of ten being monitored by one biologist no longer have a pair defending their territory, and not only that, the usual floaters, ie single ones looking for a mate and a place to claim who would normally happily settle right into such an opening–they’re not there either.

And yet there’s our pair on San Jose City Hall. They’re doing all they can to get the egg laying started soon.

This is about the point where the previous male succumbed last year (or was it 2023?) and a yearling floater took over. Hoping for their resistance to the virus and into the next generations.

March comes in on clumsy feet, kicks the trashcans down the street… Two warm days got things going and tomorrow the rain and chill come back.

Apricot seeds seem to get a better start in direct sun rather than behind a window, so the ones that had started to show signs of life were now outside in pots.  Three had leaves, two, just the beginnings of a tap root.

Five still-dormant ones were inside in their Root Riot plugs to keep a closer eye on because those can dry out fast. I knew I would need more pots and more soil soon.

There was this one out there that had a tiny white stub showing that on the others had turned into a cluster of leaves within a few hours–but not that one. The very tiniest discernible change took two days.

I considered its reluctance to thrive and said a quiet prayer: could You help the ones that would make great fruit to grow and thrive and end up where they’ll do the most good for somebody and the ones that wouldn’t to not encumber the time and water it would take to find out?

Yesterday morning that slow-mo seed was on top of the soil near the edge of the pot. Uprooted. Stabbed. No claw digging around it, no sign of a squirrel.

But at least the seed was still there to let me get a good detective-eye look at it, which was a nice touch.

I wondered how birds clean the dirt off their dinner and considered the fact that some types of apricot seeds are supposed to be sweet.

Today it wasn’t there. Nor was the other one out there that had cracked open and sent out the beginnings of a root but didn’t have leaves yet, nope, picked right out of the Root Riot within the pot to parts unknown. Definitely birds.

A little later a scrub jay flew onto the patio. Crows in blue finery. It was the first time I’ve seen one there in a year, the mockingbirds having bested them last year. It landed on the outside of a window ledge where I’ve never seen one land before because it really didn’t fit, tail and rear end smushed up hard against the wall behind it where it could guard its new territory: looking at me, looking at those three other pots lined up, looking at me. Novel take on a bird feeder ya got there, lady, don’t mind if I do.

Those last three had leaves–but the seedlings were so young that they hadn’t absorbed all the nutrients from the kernels yet, so the split halves were rounded little brown wings flapping and clapping and cheering on the little stalks stretching for the sky and clearly they still looked nicely tasty.

No you don’t. Those are mine. I found a small bird netting tent to fit over two of them and a mesh for the third.

Well, huh. I did say that prayer… Thanks for Darwinning those two for me, Jay!

And now I have two already-prepared large pots waiting for the next ones to wake up. Does that mean I’m done letting myself be told which ones are of future goodness? Hey, there’s more than one way to kill a plant, trust me, I’m good at it. Bumped into one pot last year and knocked it off the table right on its head. Once you snap it below the leaf line it’s done.

And over in that corner, I got my first set of tomato leaves today. Yay! Happy March!

Go grow things, it’s fun!

My friend Ellen sent me this picture some time ago and I’ve had the tab open ever since. Any time mine are bothering me I want to say to the ophthalmologist, yeah, feels kinda like that.

It’s a honeybee.

I would say waiting for a good meal to catch its eye.

Baby Mushroom corals can move! (Shared link, New York Times, it should work whether you’re a subscriber or not.) They take a deep breath and then go Pop!

Anybody up for a game of hop scotch down there?

My friend who took me to Kings Mountain? I took her to Andy’s Orchard today. It was only fair.

Meantime, how is it that never in my life did anyone tell me that young zebras are brown with black stripes? This picture a few days ago made me do a double take and eventually sent me looking for more.

There’s an extinct type called a quagga that, after sequencing its DNA from a museum specimen and finding out how closely related it was to a particular subgroup, researchers are trying to bring back through breeding and luck. They’ve got a small herd going that looks pretty close.

The stripes cool the animal against the heat. Quaggas were the southernmost type, living in cooler temps. They protect against biting flies. There were fewer of those flies there. And thus of stripes.

People were still talking in the 1800s about trying to domesticate that most gentle of zebras when they found out they couldn’t. They wouldn’t breed in zoos. They’d been hunted by colonizers. Animals that are less afraid are easier to catch.

There weren’t any left.

And now, or close to it at least, there are beginning to be some again.

On a side note, I kept trying to figure out why the name made me think of clams. The answer is, there’s a Ukrainian quagga mussel whose fading stripes are such that it was actually named after that zebra.

How on earth did I ever hear of a type of mussel in a river in Ukraine. Oh. That’s the invasive one they’re fighting in the Great Lakes.

Rabbit hole, I tell you. But fun to learn a little bit more about the world.

Our resident desert lizard must have found another, because I got to see a tiny one flitting across the patio. And here I had worried about the first one getting eaten. Given that it took over thirty years to see one at our house down in the flatlands at all, that was not an unreasonable assumption.

We will continue to get to see them, then. It quite made my day.

Someone up in the hills posted a video on Nextdoor of a mountain lion coming up the driveway at night; she had already been watching it carrying a deer for a half mile up the steep hill before it came in view of her Ring.

It had had to stop and catch its breath a few times.

Then mama lion found herself stuck with a wrought-iron fence between her and her cubs another half mile up an even steeper part of the hill. She checked: yes it was on both sides of the driveway she’d just come up. Rats. (The house was next to an open space preserve. I imagine dragging the deer up the driveway was easier than through thorny scrub–until it wasn’t.)

She paced a bit, triggered bright lights that direction, looks like she growled a little, decided it had to be done, and then with the lightness of a ballerina leaped clear over the six foot fence. While carrying an entire deer held high enough that it sailed above it too.

The poster then watched her continue on that long climb to her den to feed her kits.

She noted that no, those weren’t insects flitting across the front of the camera–those were bats.

She ended with the thought that you might want to keep your pets inside at night.

Link to video here, if you want to see it.

They are! They’re actually eating the leaves. Goldfinches love sunflower leaves specifically and this site recommends planting them near your veggies as a decoy because you might as well make use of this, right?

They said it mostly happens in California. I have questions.

My phone could see the details my eyes no longer can, and upon embiggening that’s exactly what those two birds were.

But I like my sunflowers… So I took a bit of bright pinkish-red thick yarn and tied it around the upper stalk of the one they were going after the hardest.

It didn’t take long before I saw another one swooping in–and then whoawhoawhoa!!! it about did a backflip in the air trying not to continue in that direction. Close!

It went to ground. It started eating the weed seeds. The little tiny stabby ones that attack your socks and wedge themselves into the yarn and you can hardly see them but man can you feel them. Hey you guys! Eat those!

Next thing you know we had a small flock doing exactly that.

Postscript: Most cities around here canceled their fireworks, given the intense heatwave and the wildfires already going, but it turns out the ones closest to us were still on. They apparently were moved so as to be completely over the water, which means we could stand in our front yard and see almost everything. Well into it, the kids and mom across the street finally opened the door to ask questions; we called to them to come on over, our place was on enough of a rise that they would see a lot more from here.

They had lived all over the world and then here the past few years and the kids had questions about the Fourth of July. I couldn’t hear much over the booms but Richard gave them a bit of Fort McHenry history.

There was one again! Did you see the sunflower?! Oh that’s so cool!

And then yet another sunflower. YES.

And good memories were made for all.

The San Jose peregrines: one sister did not survive fledging, the other three are doing fine.

There have never been all females before.

They are notably more social than past fledglings. They hang out. They have sleepovers–none of this snoozing on separate buildings nonsense.

They are so funny. They play mid-air. They hang around the home nest and runway instead of dispersing further and further away. They tease each other. They dance with their heads. They’ll repeatedly put out a foot to hold up a sibling: You didn’t say Simon Says! Or actually push her with it. And step on her tail if that didn’t get enough attention. Or pull on a feather. (28 seconds in) or (Mom! She’s not sharing!) reach between her sister’s feet to steal the prey. (2:40.)

From the cool of early morning, before it hit 102F in our town: Bouncy bouncy bounce! Skid! Bounce!