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Took the weekend off, more or less (if one doesn't count the being surgically grafted to Diablo 2 1.10 for a couple of 10-hour stretches), and attended to Normal Things, like groceries, library books, and avoiding the laundry. (This is becoming difficult, as it's taken over the bathroom and part of the walk-through closet. We did break down and tackle three loads of essentials on Sunday night, which alas doesn't seem to have included towels...)
On the way to the library, I went to get into the passenger side of the car and flushed out a peculiar long-billed bird that had been huddling in the leaves in the gutter. Since the lakefront is a migration route and interesting things occasionally drop in, I went after the bird, which had run under the car in front of ours; once I'd managed to get Mum back out of the car, we were able to convince the bird out from under its attempted cover and into the street, where we were able to get a good look at it.
We were stumped: my initial instinct that it was a woodcock didn't seem quite right, out in the open, but Mum hadn't a clue either. It was somewhat bigger than a robin, with a long and slightly curved beak, and an oddly sawed-off tail-end. I herded the bird out of the street; it headed, on foot, down the alley, and ducked under a back-porch door, where it sat and glared at me through the slats.
We left it to its sulking and went to the library to look it up. Our best guess is that it was an immature Virginia Rail, since it didn't have a fat enough head to be a woodcock and snipes have straight bills. But I have no idea what it thought it was doing squatting in a gutter on the north side of Chicago...
The odd part is that this is the second one of these I've seen in the last few weeks. (The first one was picking around in a lawn in Franklin Park.) Perhaps it's a climate-change thing and they're moving in...
The abundant seeds from the Sacrificial Vegetable went kind of fermenty (I was drying them to plant later), so I chucked them out into the wilderness that the landlord calls a front courtyard. This will be interesting: about once a year she makes a desultory attempt to coerce her alleged maintainance staff into doing something about the weeds, but given that last year their sum total of effort to this end consisted of whacking up the one big thistle that was threatening the front doorway, I fully expect to see a pumpkin patch out there this time next year...
On the way to the library, I went to get into the passenger side of the car and flushed out a peculiar long-billed bird that had been huddling in the leaves in the gutter. Since the lakefront is a migration route and interesting things occasionally drop in, I went after the bird, which had run under the car in front of ours; once I'd managed to get Mum back out of the car, we were able to convince the bird out from under its attempted cover and into the street, where we were able to get a good look at it.
We were stumped: my initial instinct that it was a woodcock didn't seem quite right, out in the open, but Mum hadn't a clue either. It was somewhat bigger than a robin, with a long and slightly curved beak, and an oddly sawed-off tail-end. I herded the bird out of the street; it headed, on foot, down the alley, and ducked under a back-porch door, where it sat and glared at me through the slats.
We left it to its sulking and went to the library to look it up. Our best guess is that it was an immature Virginia Rail, since it didn't have a fat enough head to be a woodcock and snipes have straight bills. But I have no idea what it thought it was doing squatting in a gutter on the north side of Chicago...
The odd part is that this is the second one of these I've seen in the last few weeks. (The first one was picking around in a lawn in Franklin Park.) Perhaps it's a climate-change thing and they're moving in...
The abundant seeds from the Sacrificial Vegetable went kind of fermenty (I was drying them to plant later), so I chucked them out into the wilderness that the landlord calls a front courtyard. This will be interesting: about once a year she makes a desultory attempt to coerce her alleged maintainance staff into doing something about the weeds, but given that last year their sum total of effort to this end consisted of whacking up the one big thistle that was threatening the front doorway, I fully expect to see a pumpkin patch out there this time next year...
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