Steve and Judy's Travels!

Perched on a silhouette of a chickadee!

An outbreak of house flies in the yard.  Don’t know what causes it, but it happens around this time of year.  It’s annoying.

Got an idea, researched online, and put out a fly trap consisting of a hanging two-quart jar with some attractant and water in it that draws the flies in and they can’t get out.  It worked.  It smells terrible, so we had to put it a ways away from the deck, but it works.  After a few weeks we had a pretty good collection of flies floating in there, but then things got weird.  It started collecting faster and faster until it was almost full.  I’ll spare you the photo.  That couldn’t be right because there just weren’t that many flies to collect in the first place.  I realized that not only were flies trapped in the jar and couldn’t get out, they were breeding in the jar before they died and the population was increasing exponentially!

Gross!  We now know there is a practical time limit on how long we can leave that fly trap out.  We disposed of the old one and put a fresh one out.

Did I ever confess my confusion about backpacking prep lists?  All those years ago, on our first backpacking trip together in Colorado, we were comparing backpacking lists to make sure we weren’t missing anything.  I saw a tide table on yours.  Tide.  That’s the detergent we’ve always used to wash our clothes.  I immediately went there.  A tide table.  I couldn’t figure out why or how we could bring a table for washing clothes, but I knew you wouldn’t pack anything unnecessarily heavy, so I just waited to see what it turned out to be.

It never turned out to be anything on that trip in Colorado.  It wasn’t until a later trip, on the Olympic Peninsula, that I was able to escape that first fatal logic flaw and realize that a tide table didn’t have anything to do with washing clothes; you needed to bring along a tide chart anytime you might be walking along the coast.  Don’t want to get caught out on a spit at the bottom of a cliff during a rising tide.  Not an issue I ever had to consider on my backcountry trips in Colorado.

The kids are in England and Ireland and we’re helping them identify birds.  A virtual birding tour for Judy and me!  The pictures are all forwarded from cellphones so they can be a little scratchy.

It looks like most of the ducks are mallards.

One that looks like a Swedish Blue.

They look like this.

(From the internet.)

Canada Goose.  Mute Swan.

Rock Pigeon.  (Like ours in the states.)

A gull.

I’m going to guess an off-season black-headed gull.  That’s not something we see here.

A Rook.

Looks like a big Raven.  Definitely don’t see that here.

And a White Wagtail.

(From the internet.)  Another bird we’ve never seen.