July 2008 Archives

Photos from a loop of the Olympic Peninsula last weekend, starting at Rialto and working our way north to Lake Crescent and Hurricane Ridge. Check out the entire set here.

It's new IKEA catalog day!

I finally got around to posting pictures from a cool, crisp, late-April trip out to the Pacific beaches of Grays Harbor County, where we visited hundreds of thousands of migrating sandpipers and other shorebirds that were town for a few days before they continued on up the coast to the Arctic for the summer breeding season. Check out the gallery here.

A new set of photos from a beautiful day trip to Mount Rainier National Park on July 12, 2008. The sun was out, the wildlife was out, the people were out, the six feet of snow was out?!

Check them all out here.

So with the house and tree-filled yard it was obvious that a bird feeder (or six) would liven things up, especially for Jasper.  So far there's now a Chickadee feeder (featured on a previous Caturday), two suet feeders -- one cheap basic metal cage and one fancy tail-prop feeder purchased after the brief sighting of a Pileated woodpecker in the pines -- a hummingbird feeder, a basic tube feeder (to distract the House Sparrows), a thistle sock, and a peanut wreath for the jays.

They've done a fine job of attracting the wildlife, with a herd of at least a dozen chickadees spearheading the wildlife extravaganza of Bushtits, House Sparrows, House Finches, Goldfinches, Bewick's Wrens, Nuthatches, Steller's Jays, and Northern Flickers... who are apparently the big winners here as the three of them have apparently decided they like to eat EVERYTHING.

To whit, I've recently started work on a BirdCam using the hardware leftover from the old Houseboat camera. It's not ready for prime time yet, but behold the first few tests...

This is how the chickadee feeder is supposed to work. Note the bird bath and two suet feeders in the background on the right side of the image, and of course, a chickadee who immediately figured out the feeder was for him.

This is a Flicker having an identity crisis.

As spotted yesterday on the Seattle Animal Shelter listings for cat adoption events, the adorable cat "Adoption Event - A", which is actually just a place-holder to announce off-site foster cat events. But wait, who's that cat in the second picture of sample fosters?  Why, it's Dulcie! (Who amusingly enough never actually attended an off-site adoption event because she and her sister were adopted out directly from their Petfinder listings...)  Obviously I took such an awesome photo that it causes people to drop everything when they see it and rush out to adopt cats.

Here's a link to a screenshot I took in case the page disappears after the event. Hopefully Dulcie and Carmela (or whatever their names are now) are still enjoying their wonderful new Wallingford home and are merely providing star power to help other fosters get adopted out to great homes like theirs.

An estimated 2,500 lightning strikes in Western Washington over the past twenty-four hours, with more forecast for the next twenty-four hours.  It was a wild night for flashes and booms, and for once it wasn't because of the noisy neighbors.

Given our typical lack of any real thunderstorm activity, it's interesting to note that the 4th of July holiday in 2006 also started with some strong night-time thunderstorms, then more during the afternoon prior to the fireworks (and massive fire.)

But remember, summer in Seattle doesn't officially start until July 5...

UPDATE: And how could I forget the thunderstorms that produced the lightning seen in the photos I use in my site banner?  Those storms occurred overnight on July 12, 2007... apparently there's something special about early in the month of July.