Through my office window I’ve seen this dove refurbing an old nest.
Now she’s in residence.
I knew I heard a hummingbird. We saw the little buzzbomb yesterday having a long drink at the feeder out back as we sat down to dinner.
Well, sir. Now it’s spring.
Out front, a dove has refurbished a wind-battered nest atop the wisteria. Same dove as last year? Beats me. I asked, she didn’t answer.
The rest of the world’s ills notwithstanding, I am very much enjoying getting up, making coffee, and checking the news to find out that nobody I know has bothered to collect and distribute the wit and wisdom of the previous occupant of the Oval Office.
That’s one bird whose song we can do without. Until the judge says, “Will the defendant please rise?”
Tags: doves, hummingbirds
Mad Blog Media 
April 6, 2021 at 8:40 am |
Will the defendant please rise would be music to my ears. And, doves are not re-incarnated architects. They build the worst nests in the world, but they seem to work most of the time.
April 6, 2021 at 10:30 am |
Gotta cut them some slack. Their brains are the size of an Easter jellybean, they don’t have opposable thumbs, and their momma kicks them out of the nest before they have a chance to really study the load bearing members, connective tissue, or construction GANT charts. Given that, the simplicity and functionality of any bird’s nest of choice is pretty amazing.
April 6, 2021 at 9:24 am |
By the way, I gave the Sony RX100 to my sister in law. I told her the problems I was having with it, especially the crowded controls on the back. She said she had small hands and was willing to try it out. I said ”It’s yours.” Mailed it off the same day.
April 6, 2021 at 1:37 pm |
Mine is still psychotic. Turns itself on and off whenever it likes, and more than once, too. Changes focus areas, usually to something that results in an out-of-focus image. Randomly decided the SD card was full (it wasn’t). Now and then I glance over to the office toolbox, where the hammer is.
April 6, 2021 at 9:35 am |
I am so in agreement on the news! The best present of 2021 is the absence of his orangeness from the news. Or at least the news I’m connected to. Who knows what’s going being relayed on the alternative news networks.
April 6, 2021 at 1:38 pm |
It reminds me of the occasional stink-free day we’d get in Greeley, when the wind was blowing from somewhere other than the Monfort feedlot or the sugar-beet plants.
April 6, 2021 at 10:26 am |
WRT the rest of the world’s ills … one or more of y’all have a Frederick, MD connection, yeah? Navy corpsman shot up an office park, then high-tailed it to Fort Detrick where his story comes to an end. Freaking Fort Detrick is never in the news for anything good. And when there are olympic swimming pools worth of nerve agent buried underground, there’s a ready-made conspiracy theory sitting there ripe for the picking every time there’s anything in the news.
April 6, 2021 at 1:43 pm |
That would be Herself’s former hometown. Her elder sis just moved back to Woodsboro, Md., from Florida (she and her old man got married in Woodsboro). And Your Humble Narrator was born in Annapolis and lived (briefly) in Glen Burnie.
So, yeah, short answer is we all Marylanded up here in this bitch.
April 7, 2021 at 8:47 am |
Rockville, ‘70-72
Edgewood/Aberdeen ‘79-81
Frederick ‘81-83
Alexandria VA 87-88
Just read a recap of Fort Detrick’s woes and tribulations. The crazy part is, they left out the really weird stuff that never made the national news. There’s a Nobel prize winner who worked at the infectious disease lab there doing 25 to life that my mom still swears was framed.
My dad’s last two jobs were Edgewood Arsenal (weaponized bugs and gas) and Fort Detrick (bugs and gas research). About 9 years working with stuff that will mess you up. Gotta wonder how much of his health deterioration was related to that.
April 6, 2021 at 11:16 am |
Years ago while climbing poles, using ladders, or using a bucket truck I encountered a dove sitting on her eggs in a nest barely a foot from me. She didn’t blink, move, flutter, or make any indication that she was there while I was there.
I finished my work and she stayed with her work, and then I left.
April 6, 2021 at 1:48 pm |
This dove isn’t at all concerned about us. Not even the garbage trucks can dislodge her. She’s taking care of business.
April 6, 2021 at 1:42 pm |
If Miss Mia has hair that a couple of brush strokes might collect, you might try if the sharp claws will allow, to collect some and then drop it fluttering to the ground out in the yard in sight of the Dove. She might try to utilize it for nesting material. A number of years ago I took some long hair cat fur out in the yard and dropped it into the breeze. Before it hit the ground a nesting bird flew by and grabbed it in flight.
Speaking of the UCI, are any of you as irritated as I about riders the punishments to riders seen tossing bottles along the roadside or to race spectators? How many times have you seen water bottles at a pro level event hang around in the grass, in the weeds, etc. for very long? Fans pick them up pretty fast. I can’t say that I’ve ever really seen that many loose bottles at amateur events. The only bottles I tossed were at circuit race or criterium races where my car was nearby so that I could collect them afterward. With the various regulations now implemented for bike racing (not allowing the super tuck at the pro level !), I certainly wouldn’t consider racing as an occupation. No I’d go into something less regulated like politics where even after you’re found guilty of doing something wrong you still get paid.
April 6, 2021 at 2:02 pm |
The UCI. Those pendejos. I used to have big fun with them when I still cartooned for that Boulder-based journal of competitive cycling whose name seems to elude me. They’ve always had a knack for focusing like a laser beam on the wrong target. Remember your George Carlin: When asked about “the dope problem,” he observed, “I definitely feel that we have too many dopes.”
Click here for a larger image
April 7, 2021 at 8:48 am |
No one did it better. That one was a classic.