Steve and Judy's Travels!

 

The Denver Broncos remain undefeated in 2020.

 

Go Broncos!!!

 

 

 

Where are all the dead birds?

 

How long do songbirds live?  Maybe 10 years?  That would mean in a stable population, about 10 percent of all the birds die each year.  According to my painstaking ten-second research on google, there are on average about 15 billion (15,000,000,000) birds in the U.S.  If 10% of them die each year, that’s one and a half billion (1,500,000,000) dead birds every year!  Where are they?

 

Sure, some are inside the bellies of cats and other predators, or scavengers, but that’s an awful lot of predating and scavenging to get rid of that many carcasses in the United States alone.  I’ve heard windmills and windows kill a lot of birds.  It’s easy to get to windmill farms here in Texas.  I’ve gone to them and walked around under individual windmills looking for dead birds, just as an anecdotal test, and have yet to find a dead bird.  We’ve got a hundred birds flying around the bird feeder in our yard every day.  Not only that, we’ve got windows.  Yet I don’t see any dead birds under the feeder or below our windows.

 

Is there a bird graveyard, like elephants are supposed to have an elephant graveyard, because you don’t find a lot of elephant bones lying around Africa?

 

 

I do the folding.  Sheets, towels, handkerchiefs, cloth napkins; that’s what I do.  I don’t do it like mom did, with a mangle though.  Many a day we came home from school to find mom in the service porch mangling sheets and handkerchiefs with something like this:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJiVjzUTsA8

 

What could possibly go wrong with mangles, on/off levers, and fingers involved.  Remarkably, mom kept all her fingers all her life!

 

Brought up with a mangle in the house, and with none at hand now, I do what I can with what I’ve got.  I use a “hand mangle” technique to smooth things out.  Sheets, towels, handkerchiefs, no problem for me; except for fitted sheets.  Fitted sheets were a pain.  I had figured out how to fold them square, but it was cumbersome.  I watched YouTube videos on how to fold them; most I didn’t understand.  But this guy; this guy knows what he’s doing.  In fact, he knows what he’s doing so well that he can actually demonstrate it so I can understand it.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHTyH2nuFAw

 

Ever since I adopted this technique, fitted sheets are the easier sheet to fold.

 

Since fitted sheets are easier now, I guess I’ll need to turn my attention to improving my flat sheet folding technique next.

 

 

It terrorized the bird feeder for a few weeks, but now it has moved on to song; a singer not a fighter.  That few weeks of aggressive behavior might mostly be a matter of seasonal hormones brought on by springtime.  We’re back to the normal fluid feeder hierarchy where the bigger birds tend to muscle out the smaller birds, but the mix of birds is constantly changing, so everyone gets a chance.

 

 

And a special alert.  Formula 1 racing resumes for another season, starting next weekend in Australia.  Don’t forget to set your timers.  Practice Session 1 is on Thursday!

 

 

Big Brother.  Every online vendor is tracking our purchases and preferences.  Who knows how much of that the government knows.  Uninvited invisible intrusion into our lives.

 

I thought about it, checked a resource, and determined that unwelcome observation isn’t a problem after all.  I asked Alexa if she was spying on us and she answered “No.”  She said she values our privacy.