Wild, Wild, Life

So for the past few Saturdays, when the Lovely Bride has been going into town for her Tai Chi classes, I've been taking hikes down along the old Black River to see the heronry there. I've talked about these dinosaur birds before, and I wanted to check on them before the cottonwood trees came in too thick.

They're still there, and I counted about fifty nests, though some of these may be abandoned from previous years. The colony itself was less raucous than I've seen in other years, but that may just be the time of the day. There is a lot of nesting and still some nestbuilding. The eagles are back as well, across the way, near the still-empty office buildings they put in a few years ago. But the remains of the Black River were dominated with geese, ducks, and other waterfowl.

There are herons up at my workplace as well, as we border on the Mercer Slough, and some of them may be making a similar commute to my own from the south during the day. We also had a mink show up at the office's front door last week. Definitely smaller than an otter (we have those too), and with finer, less shiny fur, the small creature nosed about the front door before the mass of people watching spooked it and it loped off.

If it had hung around another five minutes we would have given it a programming test and see if it could work in an office environment.

More later,