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Heard on the phone…

 ..while talking with Becky: “Conner, where are you going with the glue?” Pause. “Conner, maybe *first* you should decide what you want to glue, *then* open the glue.” Conner is six.  
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When Casey was here for a visit

We went paddling together. I paddled my traditional kayak. Casey brought this goofy new-fangled thing. It has wheels on top, pedals, and paddle wings underneath that flap back and forth. Hard to imagine any respectable paddler would drive something like that.

Here is how it looked to me most of the day:

I watched from behind, Casey cruising along effortlessly about twice as fast as I could go. What a cool new-fangled thing.

We explored a small bit of the channels and mudflats of the Laguna Madre. Rivers of fish swam right underneath us in the shallow water. Sometimes there were so many fish in such a hurry the water ahead of us was a boiling wave. The birds out there seemed unusually tame, allowing us to glide right by practically within reach.It was a great day.

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eBird

 Until now, I’ve tracked my bird sightings on Thayer birding software.  This software does everything.  It describes the birds, it helps you identify the birds.  There is only one thing it doesn’t do well for me.  Its reporting options are limited.  It keeps track of my life-list for me, and I can extract other information I want from it, but it’s cumbersome to figure out where I am for intermediate measures, like day, week, or year lists. There is an internet option for tracking sightings.  It’s called eBird.  It only does one thing, track sightings, and it does that very well.  Lots of birders track their sightings there.  Not only are the reporting options better, but there is a public benefit to it as well.  All the bird sightings recorded there go into a giant database that is available for ornithologists to use in tracking bird populations.  Seems like a really good idea so I’m going to use that from now on.  It’s a little tedious getting enough of my previous sighting transferred over, but once I get that done, I’ll have much more information at my disposal. And something else.  I’ve gotten about 100 birds put in so far and when I looked through the reporting options I found eBird not only showed the year-lists for the top 100 birders in total and by state, but it gave me a number for my status.  I’m number 8,502.  8,502 with only about 100 birds put in.  I’ll keep entering data as I can and see how I move up.