Saturday, April 2, 2005, 10:37 am
Home security system
LONGVIEW, TEXAS — This morning, I went to investigate my friend’s report that a bird was nesting outside his apartment. He said that the nest was in a hanging basket.
Now, most people plant flowers of some sort in their hanging baskets and flower beds. Not Shroud and Bev. They moved into their married student apartment and quickly filled every available patch of dirt with … plastic forks. White, poky, garish plastic forks.
In this seemingly inhospitable environment, a House Finch chose to build her nest.
She has two eggs.
I did some other walking around campus. Mockingbirds were singing everywhere, and a few yellow-rumps moved around the trees. Down by the pond, I saw a shrike fly by. It harassed a starling briefly, but it didn’t seem intent on killing just then. I also saw a Killdeer and a red-belly, and I heard a flicker. A couple of Barn Swallows skimmed the pond.
I found a beautiful clump of pink oxalis behind the pond.
New leaves against a cloudless sky.
David J. Ringer
on 02 Apr 2005 at 11:14 am 1.Sunoose said …
Wow! A bird nested in that? Seems prickley to me! If I were a bird, I’d avoid that! Cuz it looks painful. . .but, I guess birds like that. . .maybe I’ll make one! Well, that is really mneat! I bet it’ll be really cool when the chicks hatch! Right outside your window every morning! Cute!
on 02 Apr 2005 at 11:50 am 2.Anonymous said …
whoa, my house is on the Internet!
awesome!
shroud
on 09 Jan 2007 at 10:09 pm 3.Search and Serendipity: A Birder’s Blog » Search and Serendipity has moved! said …
[...] My main concern was getting all the old posts and comments transferred over; the WordPress importer doesn’t work with the new Blogger. But thankfully, Ady Romantika has developed a script to import from the new Blogger to WordPress. But — augh! — it relies on allow_url_fopen, which DreamHost has disabled for security reasons. I thought I was sunk, but my talented friend Shroud (who writes a newspaper column and can be a bit eccentric) managed to modify the script so it uses cURL … and (after many tries) voila! All posts and comments appear to have come across almost perfectly. [...]
on 15 Jan 2007 at 12:55 pm 4.Search and Serendipity: A Birder’s Blog » Search and Serendipity has moved! said …
[...] My main concern was getting all the old posts and comments transferred over; the WordPress importer doesn’t work with the new Blogger. But thankfully, Ady Romantika has developed a script to import from the new Blogger to WordPress. But — augh! — it relies on allow_url_fopen, which DreamHost has disabled for security reasons. [Update 01/10/07: Ady’s script has been modified to work even when fopen is disabled.] I thought I was sunk, but my talented friend Shroud (who writes a newspaper column and can be a bit eccentric) managed to modify the script so it uses cURL … and (after many tries) voila! All posts and comments appear to have come across almost perfectly. [...]