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Saturday

  The sun came back out.  The wind and rain went away.  Fifty degrees.  A birding day.   Drove south to Loyola Beach and Riviera Beach on Baffin Bay, then worked our way back north.  Found a spot for Green Jays.  Got a Franklin’s gull.  Found a least grebe and a marsh wren at the birding center.  Found an unrecognizable carcass on the road, but it still had a flight feather on it so we brought it home and looked it up.  Barn Owl!  A short-eared owl flew across the road in front of us and almost became another unrecognizable carcass.  73 birds:  

1 Black-bellied Whistling-Duck riveria area
2 Greater White-fronted Goose riveria area
3 Snow Goose riveria area
4 American Wigeon riveria area
5 Mottled Duck riveria area
6 Blue-winged Teal birding center
7 Northern Shoveler riveria area
8 Northern Pintail riveria area
9 Green-winged Teal birding center
10 Redhead riveria area
11 Ring-necked Duck gulf waters
12 Bufflehead mustang island
13 Ruddy Duck gulf waters
14 Least Grebe birding center
15 Pied-billed Grebe gulf waters
16 American White Pelican mustang island
17 Brown Pelican mustang island
18 Double-crested Cormorant mustang island
19 Great Blue Heron gulf waters
20 Great Egret mustang island
21 Snowy Egret riveria area
22 Little Blue Heron riveria area
23 Tricolored Heron riveria area
24 Reddish Egret charlie’s pasture
25 Black-crowned Night-Heron birding center
26 White Ibis mustang island
27 Roseate Spoonbill mustang island
28 Black Vulture riveria area
29 Turkey Vulture mustang island
30 Osprey mustang island
31 Northern Harrier mustang island
32 Harris’s Hawk riveria area
33 White-tailed Hawk birding center
34 Red-tailed Hawk riveria area
35 Crested Caracara riveria area
36 American Kestrel mustang island
37 Merlin birding center
38 Common Moorhen birding center
39 American Coot gulf waters
40 Sandhill Crane riveria area
41 Black-bellied Plover mustang island
42 Killdeer mustang island
43 American Oystercatcher mustang island
44 Black-necked Stilt mustang island
45 Spotted Sandpiper charlie’s pasture
46 Greater Yellowlegs mustang island
47 Willet mustang island
48 Lesser Yellowlegs charlie’s pasture
49 Long-billed Curlew mustang island
50 Ruddy Turnstone mustang island
51 Sanderling mustang island
52 Least Sandpiper riveria area
53 Laughing Gull mustang island
54 Franklin‘s Gull riveria area
55 Ring-billed Gull mustang island
56 Forster’s Tern mustang island
57 Rock Pigeon mustang island
58 Eurasian Collared-Dove ballfields
59 Mourning Dove gulf waters
60 Barn Owl mustang island.  road kill
61 Short-eared Owl charlie’s pasture
62 Golden-fronted Woodpecker riveria area
63 Loggerhead Shrike mustang island
64 Green Jay riveria area
65 Horned Lark charlie’s pasture
66 Marsh Wren birding center
67 Northern Mockingbird riveria area
68 European Starling mustang island
69 Common Yellowthroat birding center
70 Lark Sparrow riveria area
71 Savannah Sparrow riveria area
72 Eastern Meadowlark mustang island
73 Great-tailed Grackle gulf waters

   

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Weather

Rain off and on. Nine inches in the last two weeks. Nice clear weather for the last couple days, but a little cool. Now Canada is sending us an arctic cold front. Rain, snow, and wind in the Friday night forecast. A projected low of 31 degrees. We’ll brace for that.

All this rain has exposed two slide leaks in the coach. The one in the bedroom is chronic. It’s been there for a couple years without us being able to figure out how the water is getting in. We can’t reproduce it with a hose from any direction. If we hear a storm is on the way, we pull the slide in so it won’t leak.

The other leak is a new one. We can see some worn weather stripping on one side of a living room slide. We know what to fix, we just haven’t been able to get the guy out to fix it yet. Our interim fix involves foam pipe insulation built up to two layers, stuck into the gap between the slide and the wall on the outside.

That works perfectly, as long as the wind isn’t so strong it blows the foam insulation out of the joint. That’s only happened once, but then we only tried it for the first time last storm.