jendefer

An image (lifted from Wikipedia) of a northern flicker, a slightly larger than robin-sized bird with a long sharp beak, and dark horizontal stripes over pale feathers on its wings and back.

A small thing making me happy this spring:

The Northern Flickers in my neighborhood (think: woodpecker’s cousin) have figured out that if they rap their bills on the top of the street lamps it makes a great noise that travels far. They seem to be using it as a […]

[Original post on mas.to]

This is a lateral view of a middle-spotted woodpecker climbing a tree, surrounded by branches. The sun illuminates part of the tree trunk, while the rest of the tree and the bird remain in shadow.

Middle spotted woodpecker (Dendrocoptes medius, 🇩🇪Mittelspecht, 🇵🇱 dzięcioł średni).

#birds #birdphotography #birdsofmastodon #birdwatching #nature #naturephotography #vogelflausch #ptaki

#BirdCallOut Ravens. So many ravens. Fifty or so in the sky, a dozen in trees, several more dozen on the ground and mulch piles at some sort of worksite. Was it a funeral? Or just lots of tasty bugs in the disturbed ground?

@colo_lee I thought it was a tray of brownies at first, but the reality turns out to be even better.

My photo of an orange-fronted karariki in captivity at the Isaac Conseravtion Park. It's a small green parakeet with an orange and yellow patch on its forehead, and it's perched on a branch in a tree in its aviary.

My photo of a shore plover in captivity at the Isaac Conseravtion Park. It's a small wading bird with a brown back and white belly and banded black and white head with an orange beak with a black tip. It's standing on river rocks in its aviary.

A photo of the inside of part of the kakī-black stilt aviary. It's large and mesh with natural light and a stream naturally flows through it so these braided river birds and can experience close to a natural habitat before they are released into the wild.

A photo of an adult male kakī-black stilt, a black wading bird with a long black beak and long pink legs, next to two juvenile black stilts, which are white and black. On the river rocks by them is a tray with ox-heart, a fat and protein rich food that supplements the invertebrates they catch from the stream that flows through their aviary.

On Friday I was lucky to get a tour of the Isaac Conservation Park, west of Ōtautahi-Christchurch city, NZ. It was set up by Sir Neil and Lady Diana Isaac, who had a vision of channelling their business success in quarrying and construction into nature […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

a surviving fragment of the Xiping Stone Classics, with clear, easily legible Chinese characters engraved into a thick stone tablet

an example of a calligraphic rubbing (not an especially crisp one, but it's important to be realistic about the fact they often weren't super crisp). the handwriting is a more ornate, ceremonial style.

Cool History Fact of the night

Before woodblock printing (which was extensively used in China well before the west), there was a very clever, effective way to mass-reproduce the most important texts.

A few different times in imperial China, stone tablets […]

[Original post on infosec.exchange]

Oh! I almost forgot. I also played several games of Hamster Roll, which is a really great dexterity game with nice wooden pieces. You have to put your pieces inside the hamster wheel, which causes the balance to change and it to turn slowly. It was a lot of fun.

#boardgames

Went to a fundraiser game day for our local tabletop convention yesterday. My wife and I tried out two pleasant games, Butterfly Garden (lay down path tiles for the butterflies to follow to your garden, but hexes rather than Tsuro's squares) and Mondrian (cards with colorful squares and then […]

Map of the settlement along the edge of the Monsoon Jungle. Colored pencil sketch of a town with buildings, with a river coming down between them. The locations are labeled and have names of characters associated with them. Projects are also marked with tallies to show work on them. This has the addition of the first half of the sixth season, the beginnings of the Earthhouse project.

Today #DiceyStories continues a small series that concludes our exploration of the #AlphaCentauri setting. Our Chronicles of Chiron characters have been ported to my #ttrpg, A Year in Farm Valley.

This seventh episode is the first half of monsoon season, the final […]

[Original post on dice.camp]

Golden Hour on Mont Blanc: a dome-shaped snow covered summit, with various rocky bits of mountains, under a blue sky.

Above a "do not feed the kea" sign, a kea chews away at the wooden bannister.

Me, in front of many pink cherry blossoms, and some green leaves.

A repost of grebe number 8 on a nest in front of a number 8 sign.

I had a little bit of time for pictures in February. Not much, but more than in January, and about one-third of December's output. #Birds #BirdsNZ #Alps

https://patricklam.ca/post/20260301-february-photos/

I recently learned that my local community food bank does collection of residential-grown produce in the late winter. If you've got overladen grapefruit trees in #Tucson there's a place that wants them!

https://www.communityfoodbank.org/event/super-citrus-saturdays-march-14/

#FoodRescue […]

Just lost a two-player Terraforming Mars game by one point. The deciding factor? The search for extraterrestrial life *finally* paid off for my wife. After half a dozen games and countless dollars, those tiny little microbes showed up at last!

#boardgames #TerraformingMars

Ok, now that you've sat through that rant, my family and I saw SEVEN KIWIS yesterday! 3 were on Ulva Island, and 4 were just snarfling around in the grass on the sides of the roads around Oban, the only town on Stewart Island. The giant New Zealand pigeons, Kurerū, were abundant and delightful […]

Map of the settlement along the edge of the Monsoon Jungle. Colored pencil sketch of a town with buildings, with a river coming down between them. The locations are labeled and have names of characters associated with them. Projects are also marked with tallies to show work on them. This has the additions of the fifth season, including a tumble of purple briars and a lightning rod for the Day of Atonement.

Today #DiceyStories continues a small series that concludes our exploration of the #AlphaCentauri setting. Our Chronicles of Chiron characters have been ported to my very own #ttrpg, A Year in Farm Valley.

This sixth episode is the second half of build up season […]

[Original post on dice.camp]

@PromptedInk Luisteren en herhalen! (My brain is still stamped with the Pimsleur Dutch lessons my wife and I did over a decade ago.)

Trying to clear out the pantry some. That means arepas tonight, as the bag of masa arepa has only a cup or so left in it. Probably going to stuff them with roasted red peppers and black beans, in the interest of also clearing out the freezer some.

#cooking

New bird alert! New bird alert!

My wife and I saw our first Canyon Towhee today! We went on a pleasant hike through cactus country, but is that where the bird was? No, it was at the nearby restaurant with the okay food but great window-side birding. Pickings were slim today other than the […]

A cross stitch pattern depicting a stylized phoenix with upraised wings and swirling tail. The central bird figure is surrounded by other swirls and stars and crescents. The whole figure is round, and could fit into a circular embroidery hoop. The phoenix is stitches in a variegated yellow/orange floss, which recalls its birth from fire. It is stitched on a dark charcoal grey cloth.

#CrossStitch FO! Phoenix pattern.
This was kinda fun.

I've just finished Michiko Aoyama's "What You Are Looking for Is in the Library" and quite enjoyed its series of vignettes about various people's insights following their fateful visits to the local library. Definitely a cozy read. Though now that I've seen the title of the French translation […]

On a wall of reddish concrete blocks, a Cooper's Hawk sits. Within the wall is a small backyard with a green bush covered in yellow flowers. Beyond the wall are yellow-orange condos. But really, a wash is behind the wall, and the hawk sits so that it can look into the wash for tasty treats. The cellphone picture is not great quality, but the alternating gray and black horizontal stripes on the closed tail are visible, as are the white tips.

#BirdCallOut Holy moly! Cooper's Hawk! Just swooped onto my back wall, not 12 feet from me! Good thing my computer sits right up against this big window. (Pshaw to the architect who thought this was going to be the master bedroom. Master birdroom, more like!)

#birding #BackyardBirding

Arizona does this cool thing with its state taxes where you can essentially redirect some to specific charities. This year I've given a chunk of my tax dollars to Phonetic Spit (https://www.phoneticspit.com/case-study-ahs) which gives youth an opportunity to express themselves in writing and […]

I am pondering how to approach a mending project where I only have access to one side of the fabric. Our dining room chair cushions are covered with T-shirt material (itself a mending project from 10+ years ago). One of them has finally gotten a hole, and I don't want to disassemble the whole […]

I think my favorite part is when the main character has a heart-to-heart conversation with a saint in Rome that gives new context to her troubles.

I recently read "Lunar New Year Love Story" by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham. I'd picked it up as a good February read and then was quite surprised by all its twists and turns. What surprised me most, though, was how #Catholicism was depicted. I don't think I've ever seen such a realistic […]

A Masked Lapwing in the center of a grass and dirt patch of land. The bird has long pink legs, gray wings and back, a white chest, and a black head top. The masked part of the name comes from the bright yellow jowls and ridge that surround the yellow eyes and beak. A second similar bird is off to the upper right, a bit out of focus.

Looking at other people's photos of Australian storks made me wonder if I'd ever gotten any good shots of one when I saw hundreds and hundreds of them near Darwin. It turns out, no, I didn't. But I did discover that 8 years ago I photographed this awesome Masked Lapwing!

#WildOz #birds #birding

Putting off chores by doing other chores...

Stitched artwork depicting a stone bridge with two arches. Autumnal trees above and water flowing below.

I'm happy with this now, blocked and stretched ready for framing. However I haven't got a name for it. It's an autumnal view of Sheepwash Bridge in Ashford in the Water, near Bakewell in Derbyshire. I usually have a play on words for my titles but I'm […]

[Original post on mastoart.social]

@mrundkvist Oh, wow! That is such a different board than the one I had as a child. It was an enormous red stop sign with number tracks on it. Nothing festive at all.

Today #DiceyStories continues a small series that concludes our exploration of the #AlphaCentauri setting. Our Chronicles of Chiron characters have been ported to my very own #ttrpg, A Year in Farm Valley.

This fifth episode is the first half of build up season.

Fritz and Mariah improve their […]