Photos of a Cooper’s Hawk

Tags

birds, cooper's hawk, hawk

A Cooper’s Hawk visited our house today. We have several bird feeder on the property, which attract seed eating birds. And these birds attract hawks. Food chain, you know. About a year ago a hawk or falcon caught a dove in mid air a few feet from our living room window. Both crashed into the widow, we ran outside and saw the predator fly off with the dove in its talons. No photos 😦 of this.

Today I spotted the hawk stalking our bird feeders, and grabbed my D80. I got these images. The hawk did not kill any prey this time, perhaps my presence interfered with the hunt.

Cooper's Hawk in Flight

Coopers Hawk in Tree (look closely)

Some Toxic Windows Malware

Tags

computer virus, malware, rootkit, windows

A friend of my step son came out of the Phoenix heat to vist. He brought with him an older windows pc that has been transformed into a door stop by malware. Guess who was expected resurrect the thing? Yes, me. I do earn my daily bread working with computers, software, etc. But I really don’t care for the desktop stuff. Oh well. All of us in this field get to be the uncompensated support staff for relatives, friends, friends of relatives, etc.

I expected the usual viruses, adware, and spyware that plagues windows pc’s which are not armored with firewalls, virus scanners, constant os updaters, etc. This one had a few viruses and spybots, but it also had a rootkit. I have never encountered one of these, though I have read about them. I had to peel back layers of malware just to be able to boot into safe mode command line. After a while I decided to just reinstall windows, replacing everything.

Makes me appreciate our Apple MacBookPro and iMac even more!