Adult Swainson’s hawk in flight

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bird in flight

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Swainson’s hawk fledgling

Some of the best images I’ve gotten of the Swainson’s hawk fledgling. Its got most of its flight feathers now.

Getting flight feathers

Swainson’s hawk fledgling

The Swainson’s hawk fledgling in the nest in Prescott Az that I have been observing has most of his flight feathers. He will be airborne soon.

End of honest conversations?

But the death of frank speaking is, speaking frankly, a disaster. A state, a business, even a household, cannot operate without private conversations. The carefully measured words you choose to describe a problem co-worker in an all-staff email are not the same as the harsh language you save for the one-on-one with your line manager.

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/11/can-we-talk-in-confidence-the-death-of-candour-in-the-age-of-surveillance?utm_term=RWRpdG9yaWFsX0d1YXJkaWFuVG9kYXlVUy0xOTA3MTE%3D&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&CMP=GTUS_email

I am careful about online privacy for personal issues. I blog, as you who are reading my blog know, but I share what I want to. And don’t share what I want to keep private. I have location services turned off on my iPhone. I use Facebook in a separate browser. I have Ghostery installed in Safari and Chrome, and I use the Brave privacy enhanced browser quite a bit. I would never own an Android phone. I use an Apple Macintosh, not Windows.

I think this is a loss for us as humans.

Outsmarted by a squirrel

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rodent damage to car wiring

Trap defeated by digging underneath

We trap squirrels at our Prescott house and release them out in the forest because they have done thousands of damage to our vehicles wiring over the years. Rodents, which includes squirrels, constantly chew on things because their teeth grow throughout their lives. Not unlike cutting one’s hair.

This year some animal has defeated our traps. Whatever it is, it figured out to dig under the closed end of the trap to steal the peanuts we uses as bait. We put a piece of cardboard in the trap but this did not suffice. We’ll try something else.

I don’t have a big ego, but I hate being outsmarted by a rodent 😦

On the positive side, we have had no squirrel damage this year. We seen a few squirrels around, one under Gary’s new Subaru (he bought 2 more traps when this happened). A neighbor who also traps rodents told us we has seen some squirrels around our houses.

There’s an active Swainson’s hawk nest close by, they have been eating squirrels, which helps control that population. We have trapped one small ground squirrel, far fewer than expected.

Over the years we have tried chemical repellants and electronic repellers and all have been ineffective.