Tarāpuka | Black-billed gull 🐦 :
The black-billed gull is found only in New Zealand … The black-billed gull is more slender than the red-billed gull, with a longer bill. Breeding adults have a white head, neck, rump, tail and underparts, and pale silver-grey wings and back.
West coast waves — at Waikawa Beach in Horowhenua in Aotearoa.
My friend Rachel has a thing or two to say about ageing and being old — A taxonomy of aging based on the elder tree:
the “old” are forever the Other, older than us, not like us. Until they are like us. And we are them. …
a mature tree (our 50s and 60s); an elderflower (our 70s and 80s); an elderberry (our 90s and more)
6 am and look at that: Venus side by side with Mars in the morning sky. ✨✨
Juvenile Tarapunga | Red-billed gull, a native whose conservation status is Declining. 🐦
It's a ground misty kind of morning. With Venus and sunrise.
Another in a gripping series — Dead Stop (Sydney Rose Parnell Book 2) by Barbara Nickless 📚:
With Denver beset by a series of monsoonlike thunderstorms that threaten to flood the city, Sydney and her K9 partner, Clyde, must wade through a murky trail of murder that stretches back thirty years—all to rescue a child
Spotted this roughly 5 cm grasshopper on the outside of my bedroom window this morning.
First time for everything: this Blokart had come up from Ōtaki. I haven't seen one on Waikawa Beach before.
Cyclone categories no longer fit for a heating planet:
Increasingly strong cyclones may mean a new higher-wind-speed category needs to be created, researchers say, as global heating ups the forces at play. …
climate change is turbo-charging cyclones to the point some forecasters and climate researchers say Category 5 is no longer severe enough.…
US researchers found five storms since 1980 would have qualified for the new category, with all five occurring since 2013.
The swallows love hanging out on the railing by our east window, in the early evening sun. 🐦
Such a good read I've preordered the next in series — Redemption (Eva "Lightning Dance" Duran Book 1) by Deborah J Ledford 📚 :
a Native American sheriff’s deputy risks it all to find a friend who’s gone missing.
Set around the Taos Pueblo reservation, it incorporates interesting elements of spirituality.
I suspect this juvenile Oystercatcher was one of the babies from early January. Its parent was looking a bit fed up, to my eye. 🐦
A little further along a flock of a dozen Kuaka Godwits was feeding at the water's edge.
The movie Orion and the Dark was a delight — so creative, and also fun. It's worth a watch. 🎥
I also really liked the characters: Dark, Unexplained Noises, Quiet, Sweet Dreams, Sleep and Insomnia. And of course Light. So clever!
I visited the Ōtaki Kite Festival today. The small kites were huge compared to a normal backyard kite. But the giant kites made the small (huge) ones look tiny.
This fine bulldog was a brief visitor at our place the other day. Our cat-sized waterbowl had to be refilled twice! 🐶
Today's good news for conservation — Pest control reverses 'downward slide to extinction' for kiwi | RNZ News:
The Fiordland tokoeka population at Shy Lake is growing about two percent a year.
The Department of Conservation (DOC) said chick survival in the area was zero before aerial predator control was used - 1080 bait - mostly aimed at stoats.
I used to use a Keyboard Maestro action to open my Time Machine System Preference but with some OS upgrade it stopped working properly. It would open the General section but not specifically Time Machine.
Yesterday I finally solved this via bvanpeski/SystemPreferences · GitHub:
Hooray!
What the heck! 🐦
Behind you!!! 🐦
