Hawk Team 6?

Luckily I’d gotten through two of the three New York Times I was behind (which took a long time what with the details of the bin Laden raid – 100 thumb drives and DVDs and computers and handwritten journals and how did they organize how to get all that stuff out of there and is it like an archeology site, where you have to be careful to note the location of everything you found?) before I learned that a baby hawk – an eyass – hatched yesterday!

They’re not dead! But apparently Violet has some plastic wrapped around her leg and may have to get visited by a hawk rehab expert, but how on earth would they do that with a little hawk waiting

If you look closely, you can just make out the swelling on Violet's right leg - but she's still able to feed her chick!

there, and another due to hatch any minute?

Iit’s 76 degrees, the sun is shining and I have places to go and plants to plant but here I sit, watching Violet and her poor swollen leg, waiting for a hawk expert to drop down like the Seal Team 6.

Avian update

My daughter is a cancer doctor, and sees a lot of suffering and dying; and yet (possibly in compensation) she can’t stand to hear anything about animals suffering or dying. When I told her about the hawks and eagles I was watching she told me not to tell her anything about it till all the baby birds were alive and out of the nest (once, when she was young, we watched some baby robins hatch right outside our window, and then die – which probably has more to do with her aversion than the dying people).

So I’m not going to tell her about the hawks, who keep sitting on eggs the experts say are never going to hatch.

She’s going to be sitting,” Mr. Blakeman said. “She doesn’t count days. She just sits. She sees an egg and she has a compulsion to do that. But that biological compulsion tends to evaporate as days get longer.” He said he had seen mother hawks tend their eggs for as long as a month after their expiration date and allowed “it’s a really pitiful thing.

I won’t say anything about the eagles either, since (different) experts tell us 40% of them die trying to learn to fly – but so far they’re doing fine, working on growing up.

Yesterday I thought it had snowed again when I saw this:

The white on the tree isn’t snow, but just white on the tree; and the fuzzy white on our eaglet’s head isn’t snow, but little white feathers.

He’s got a long way to go, though, to become more like Daddy (or Mommy):

Early death by hawk

I read somewhere that just sitting is the absolute worst thing you can do, and that even if you reach down and tie your shoes it’s better for you than just sitting.

And so I guess I can blame these hawks (as well as the left-leaning liberal unreliable New York Times*) for the current state of my health, because the aforesaid New York Times keeps telling us the eggs are “about to hatch!” (that was the day before yesterday); “due any second!” (yesterday); and no update yet today, from either hawks or Times.

They did have a changing of the guard, resulting in the no-crack no-beak eggs you see here. And so I’m just sitting, with very tied shoes.

^{*for anyone new here, I thought I’d better note that this is meant tongue in cheek (a very odd expression that one truly unreliable source says is derived from the “fact” that when you stick your tongue in your cheek it makes you wink (but not me); and that Wikipedia (sometimes reliable, sometimes not) says you can illustrate with an emoticon, viz. a colon and a capital P (which, when I try to write it here, WordPress turns into
). In any case (as a friend of mine says all the time in order to transition her monologue from one subject to another), I find the Times normally quite reliable and not at all left-leaning, as evidenced by this highly irritating quote from yesterday:}

…as Representative Daniel Webster, a freshman Republican from Florida, faced an unruly crowd at a packed town meeting in Orlando, where some people, apparently organized or encouraged by liberal groups…

But thank you, gray lady, for the hawk cam (and, btw, no babies yet).

Reality TV, eagle style

There are three babies, not even a week old. The nest has a little pantry at the front, filled with food (that’s about as far as I’ll go with the description); the nursery’s at the rear.

The female was there when I tuned in, and her life reminded me of mine with a newborn – there’s feeding, housekeeping, keeping the kid(s) warm and dry, and waiting for Daddy to get home. So she spent quite a long time trying to remove a branch between the nursery and the pantry, gave up, and pluncked down on top of the little gray furballs for a while. Finally, when the cheeping became pretty loud, she went to the pantry (climbing over the annoying branch) and tore off some unmentionable strips of food for the chicks.

Finally the male arrived. They conferred a bit, and the female left. Ignoring the chicks’ protests, he went directly to the branch, moving it easily with one strong beak tug. (This reminds me of the first time I ever heard the phrase “honey do list,” at an all-male workshop in South Carolina – for a while I had no idea what they were talking about, and when I figured it out, found its sex-stereotyping highly irritating. But I guess eagles do it too, but since the male eagle is smaller than the female, this is even more striking.) Then he settled down, nestling the chicks underneath, looking with mean eagle eyes at all the geese honking by.

More than 135,000 people are watching this with me, and you can too.

From Japan: Adjustment please!

It must have been pre-cognition, or maybe my Adjusters stuck the thoughts in my head, but it was strange seeing The Adjustment Bureau yesterday after writing what I wrote below.

It still makes the most sense to me, that we are some sort of experiment that Adjusters tinker with every so often. In the movie, Matt Damon is told (by one of his Adjusters) that the Bureau pulled back at the height of the Roman Empire, but intervened again during the Dark Ages, bringing mankind the Renaissance. They quit again in 1910, and “Look what happened,” the Adjuster said.

A diverting little movie – but why do they have to stick in long chase scenes and car crashes? And I’m sorry, but even though I think Matt Damon is a great actor, I can’t stand to look at him, so I spent the love scenes feeling sorry for Emily Blunt enduring those long open-mouthed kisses.

And that issue of theodicy: well, there’s free will, which can sometimes override The Chairman’s plan. But it doesn’t quite work, I’d say, for earthquakes, tsunamis, and now snowstorms in Japan.

Ideological whiplash

I once took a test that diagnosed you as a liberal or conservative depending on where you stood on all kinds of political and environmental issues. I came out pretty liberal, as you might imagine.

A reflexive liberal, you might call me – boringly predictable – until my reaction to something that appeared in my email this morning:

The disaster unfolding in Fukushima, Japan is a reminder of the dangers of nuclear power.

Right now the President has $36 billion in taxpayer subsidies to the nuclear industry to build more plants here in the US in his proposed budget. Join me and tell the President and your members of Congress that there is no place for taxpayer giveaways for the nuclear industry in the budget. Wall Street won’t invest in nuclear power and no insurance company will right them a policy. We taxpayers will foot the bill for the cost of any nuclear disaster. They are off the hook – a gift from Congress to the nuclear power industry!

and then there was a link to a Greenpeace petition.

This is irritating and misguided in so many ways. The inflammatory language: “taxpayer giveaways” (has Greenpeace joined the Tea Party?). The careless homonym: “no insurance company will right them a policy” that obscures the illogical conclusion equating earthquake-prone Japan with the United States.

I have a real problem with, as I put it in my Reply All email, “climbing on the back of a cataclysmic disaster to make a political point.” And the political point itself is so specious. Yes it’s a terrible disaster. But, unfortunately, it pales in contrast with all the death and war and environmental destruction caused by our dependence on fossil fuel. And, at least in the short term, windmills and solar panels – the “clean renewable energy” Greenpeace favors – are no substitute.

The right wing, I learned this morning as I tried to figure out where this opinion puts me, are all for nuclear energy (they’re pro any business, I guess). Sucks to be me, I thought – but now I see there’s an anti-anti nuclear power movement on the left.

Phew.