SPRING BREAK and the winter weather warning!

 Welp, it's been an interesting week! I think we officially have exceeded our "winter weather" days in spring compared to actual winter this year!

Not that it lasted, but apparently this week we had a "winter weather warning," which I didn't fully understand because it stayed with lows in the upper thirties and mostly rained.

  But - and this is an exciting but - on Wednesday, we were barraged with a healthy heaping of hail and by all accounts, it snowed. Strange times! Not uncommon, but commonly strange is a bit of a theme here meteorologically. 

Mostly, though, it rained. 

 Aprils showers and all that. Although of course all the flowers have already come out and April flowers presumably now will bring May grass pollen and leafy trees, but that is admittedly a lot less catchy. 

Still, it was remarkable in a certain regrard: We did in fact skip our walk on Tuesday. This is an exceptionally rare event reserved only for when it is both; (1) raining heavily, and (2) very windy. This is because when both happen at once, there is zero way to stay dry, and the birds often stay hidden in trees anyways. 

(Also, Allan has been wanting to write a story called Junco City for months now and it was reserved for a day when she wouldn't be writing about her bae walk in her journal. It is a bit of a bloody tale of dynasties falling and patricides, as one would expect of juncos)

But beyond that, we persisted in all variety of weather conditions even my least favorite, sunny and sneezy. 

While the hooded mergansers seem to have finally moved on from our little pond, we have a new resident: Mr. Red Winged Blackbird. These guys are pretty cool and fabulously ridiculous.

 In breeding season, the males defend a fairly large territory which hosts a bevy of ladies. The dude flat out doesn't parent, so he spends most of his time patrolling the territory and screaming KONKLAREEEEEEEE with a real buzzer-trill to make sure everyone knows this is his damned territory and he's happy to get down with any ladies in the area who wanna single parent and forgo child support payments for the rest of the season.

 

But beyond this, he gets aggressive, picking fights with anything that moves to prove his worth and make up for basically spending his entire spring existence standing around and yelling. 

This includes our crows, who really don't give whoop about the RWBB when it isn't directly attacking them. Then again, they seem to relish harassing birds that are bigger than them, so it feels only fair for them to be on the other side of the equation sometimes. Mostly. 

Not sure they love turnabout on that one but such is the cycle of gonzo bird assaults.

 The RWBB doesn't discriminate though. After flying at a crow, he went for a sparrow in record time before returning to his post to scream a little bit more about his territory. 

Personally, I've got a hat and a lot of cover should the little bugger get any ideas about me.

 

Yes, I've almost been fully swooped by a crow. It's a known liability of feeding crows. They never do it maliciously, but sometimes they do want to catch your attention, and letting their tiny little crow bodies breeze your head is a good way to do it. Sometimes they misjudge and people get a little cut here or there. 

Other times they aren't playing around and you're too close to their nest, and that's an entirely different thing! Just feeling the air woosh and they go past, though, is kind of cool!

Anyways, blackbirds...

When they aren't all strung out on testosterone, Red winged blackbirds like to flock in huge numbers with nefarious birds like starlings. I imagine that, although they are native birds, the blackbirds get some guilt by association, as starlings are pretty universally hated for being invasive by human beings who thoroughly lack a sense of irony. Oh, you hate starlings and house sparrows because they aren't "supposed to be here" and they disrupt native environments... geee what other species can you think of that does that but orders of magnitude more, Karen?? 

Anyways, both starlings and blackbirds do damage crops (speaking of huge as fuck disruptions to the local ecology and harm to native bird populations), so a lot of technology has gone into figuring out ways to shoo them away or just flipping kill them. There are some interesting brutal methods employed, some that can result in birds dropping dead hours later and landing like a plague over some unwitting town. But I digress. 

Pretty birds. Plenty o'problems. But they obviously are doing alright. 

To pivot unceremoniously...

This week has generally been a smidge more chill, but just a smidge. Technically this was "spring break," at least for the public schools. "Spring Break" generally impacts two mornings of Allan's life, but it does take a bit of the scheduling edge off. On Wednesday we filled our "art class and SLP time" with Birdsong Basics, our newest Cornell Labs class. On Friday... gentle morning and then a little extra birding. 

Otherwise, we did continue on with our at home stuff. 

Allan did go to her Monday homeschool art group

We did go to horse therapy as well. 

But to honor spring break, we did take off Friday anyways. To enjoy being off on a weekday, we took a little adventure to downtown Seattle, up past the sculpture garden to the first bit of the Elliot Bay Trail. 

There were gulls. So many gulls. 

Little juvenile gulls. 

Gulls with giant shells in their beaks so they could not close their mouths for several minutes... 

Gulls eating crabs

And gulls who support the LGBTQIA community. They are thriving down there and quite beautiful to watch when they soar. 

There were also some crows and pigeons as well and a few other less common waterfowl. But the biggest hit was a combination of GULLS!!!! and a little beach near the trailhead

Very classic Seattle beach vibes!

It was fun. I am now tired. But we did pretty much turn around and go back out to the pond after some lunch, because bae walk only gets cancelled for rainy+windy

As a small epilogue: I still say my doctor has mediocre bedside manner, but looks like my d-dimer is now normally "high" (.51 with a reference range of .49) instead of insane (6.3 with a reference range of .49), so I'm going to blame a bad blood draw for that abnormal result, since everyone is that kind of "little bit" over from what I read.

 Granted I'm still in full torso migrating physical pain mode with a side of IBS and some inner ear annoyance but feeling a little more confident that this is more of a compressed spinal nerve issue plus the fun of being me and less of a "every kind of cancer all at once with a side of autoimmunity and possible sepsis." 

So, yay for that I guess.

Hope today is a a nice awesome day. Going to be mid-sixties here and back to our regularly scheduled early-spring. yay?