Posted today on BCAW:

   They are sneaky...I was there just a few minutes before that & nuttin!

[Cute puppyBath time]

Cute puppy


Bath time

2 cute videos on cheezburger...

Baby Cockatiels' first 30 days

The language may be a bit rougher than I tend to post here, but too cute to not share!

Don't know when she arrived...but good to see her!

I didn't know Maverick, but it's so sad when we lose one who's been around for so long.  He lives on in his many eyases...

One especially for jeanne!

owl tennis

[here]

Me neither...creepy! 

2011 Flood Bugnado Bugnadoes

Explained at Life's Little Mysteries:

    On the night of July 4, professional storm chaser and photographer Mike Hollingshead caught sight of an enormous bugnado in southwestern Iowa. The air above the cornfields was so thick with bugs "it looked like it was smoking," Hollingshead told Life's Little Mysteries. He captured the strange sight on camera..

    Joe Kieper, an entomologist who is executive director of the Virginia Museum of Natural History, says they are swarms of either mayflies or midges...

    But whichever type of insect they were, they literally had a field day this summer. "If it's a flooded cornfield, that would explain why there are so many critters," Kieper said. "When you get water in a field, vegetation starts to rot and the water fills with bacteria. This is food for the insects. Because there's so much food available, when they emerge as adults, you get this huge swarm."

I can pretty well guarantee that these are midges rather than mayflies, whose emergence swarms can be so big as to be visible on radar, but individually are larger than those seen in the video.


via TYWIKIWDBI

And stills posted here

[StarTribune]

...Black capped Chickadee...



    "I think it has a lot of luck and a lot of skill," said Michael North, a veteran licensed bird bander who captured the aged but still frisky bird in a large net near his home east of Pillager, in central Minnesota, twice this month. "It's probably a dominant bird, and is getting access to the best resources. It's a numbers game, too. Just by chance some birds are going to live longer than others."

    Thursday was the sixth time North has held the same bird since he first placed a small ID band on its leg in May 2002, when he estimated it was two years old. He hadn't seen it since January 2010, nearly two years ago, but when it showed up this month, it had outlived the previously-oldest black-capped chickadee in U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) records. That bird was last seen in Massachusetts in 1980, when it was 11 years and two months old. The Pillager chickadee was, as of Thursday, 11 years and six months old.

Additional details at the StarTribune.  I frankly had no idea these little birds lived that long.  You learn something every day.


via TYWKIWDBI

If you're checking out Rhea Mae and Tiago's cam at the Sheraton in Toronto, please be sure to report if you see either of them at the nest site.  It's hard for Linda to get down there during the Winter and she's asked for our help.

http://www.peregrine-foundation.ca/Web_Cams/TorontoSheraton/index.htm

Thanks!

I check just about every day as I do Quest also. I'll be lookin! 

And you know I'm on it too!

[CCB Eagle Nest Blog]

Promising news at the CCB Eagle Nest Blog

This morning January 1, 2012, both adults arrived at the nest together at 6:45. The female stayed only about 6 minutes and then flew off. The male left and returned with his talons full of grass and straw. He left again and did the same thing returning with more grass, this time calling for his mate who did not respond. He then left at 7:56 and has not returned. The female arrived about 8:30 with grass in her talons, stayed a few minutes and left. Now the nest has a pile of grass and straw. The new year has begun.

 

More pics at the blog

My Cats Hanging Out with the Eagles

...the party with us! Ei

Ei

just went off the air...Ei