Nuthatches and Danios
Oct. 10th, 2007 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoRed breasted nuthatches are coming to the feeders. It must be autumn for sure. Went out to do chores this morning and the air temperature was only 44°F.
Since the weekend I've been noticing the nuthatches. We have two species here, the white breasted and the red breasted. The whites are in evidence year round, and notable for their habit of taking a single sunflower seed at a time from the feeder and flying away with it. I think they cache the seeds by jamming them into crevices in tree bark. The red breasted nuthatch is a smaller bird, the size of a chickadee but much more energetic and athletic. They hang upside down or sideways to feed if it is convenient, and make a fair amount of noise with a call that sounds like a tiny goat bleating. Often they show up in groups of four or five and aggressively compete for spots at the choice feeders. Fun to watch, but I'm glad I'm not one of them. Generally we notice them in fall and winter, and it varies from year to year whether we have lots of them or very few. There were a few last winter, none the winter before. Looks like we may have an abundance this year, so I'll make sure we keep peanuts and suet well stocked.
Jeff, our aquarium maintenance guy at the library, brought me some new fish yesterday too. Two weeks ago I gave him a dozen tiny wagtail platys, as mine have been having babies in large numbers. He was eager to get them because he says good livebearers are difficult to get around here. He offered me cash but I said I'd rather trade for other fish, and suggested a few zebrafish. He thought that sounded fine, but what he brought were pearl danios, cousins to the common zebrafish. They are larger, and very energetic. He gave me six in a large bucket and warned me to keep the lid on because they would try to jump out. Every now and then through the afternoon I could hear a "ploop" as one of them did that. Got them home and dumped them into our large tank (30 gallons) where they immediately began zooming about. As far as I can tell, they kept that up all night, even with the lights off. I suspect they will devour most of the remaining baby platyfish, but so far they haven't bothered the adults. I'm going to have to add more cover to the tank if I want baby fish to survive in there, or else get another tank, though I don't know where I'd put it.
Oh, and a loud raspberry to Cisco for their crappy software with no documentation. Some of you will remember my long battle to get our Watchguard firewall to talk to the Cisco at another library. We finally got that working, more or less. Now it develops that I am supposed to be "on call" for some network issues one week a month. I don't expect many calls, but OK. Except... in order to deal with the primary type of problem we get, I need to be able to link to the VPN from home.
The Cisco based VPN uses L2TP rather than PPTP, so I had nothing to drive it on my Linux machines at home. Peter said there was a Linux client from Cisco, and he sent it to me. Of course "Linux" turns out to be actually "RedHat" (No, they are NOT synonyms folks, no matter how much RedHat wants you to think that.) The so-called Linux client won't run on Slackware or Debian apparently. So I thought I could use the Windows client and just run it under VMware. Nope, that doesn't work either, probably because their routing implementation is too primitive.
Since the weekend I've been noticing the nuthatches. We have two species here, the white breasted and the red breasted. The whites are in evidence year round, and notable for their habit of taking a single sunflower seed at a time from the feeder and flying away with it. I think they cache the seeds by jamming them into crevices in tree bark. The red breasted nuthatch is a smaller bird, the size of a chickadee but much more energetic and athletic. They hang upside down or sideways to feed if it is convenient, and make a fair amount of noise with a call that sounds like a tiny goat bleating. Often they show up in groups of four or five and aggressively compete for spots at the choice feeders. Fun to watch, but I'm glad I'm not one of them. Generally we notice them in fall and winter, and it varies from year to year whether we have lots of them or very few. There were a few last winter, none the winter before. Looks like we may have an abundance this year, so I'll make sure we keep peanuts and suet well stocked.
Jeff, our aquarium maintenance guy at the library, brought me some new fish yesterday too. Two weeks ago I gave him a dozen tiny wagtail platys, as mine have been having babies in large numbers. He was eager to get them because he says good livebearers are difficult to get around here. He offered me cash but I said I'd rather trade for other fish, and suggested a few zebrafish. He thought that sounded fine, but what he brought were pearl danios, cousins to the common zebrafish. They are larger, and very energetic. He gave me six in a large bucket and warned me to keep the lid on because they would try to jump out. Every now and then through the afternoon I could hear a "ploop" as one of them did that. Got them home and dumped them into our large tank (30 gallons) where they immediately began zooming about. As far as I can tell, they kept that up all night, even with the lights off. I suspect they will devour most of the remaining baby platyfish, but so far they haven't bothered the adults. I'm going to have to add more cover to the tank if I want baby fish to survive in there, or else get another tank, though I don't know where I'd put it.
Oh, and a loud raspberry to Cisco for their crappy software with no documentation. Some of you will remember my long battle to get our Watchguard firewall to talk to the Cisco at another library. We finally got that working, more or less. Now it develops that I am supposed to be "on call" for some network issues one week a month. I don't expect many calls, but OK. Except... in order to deal with the primary type of problem we get, I need to be able to link to the VPN from home.
The Cisco based VPN uses L2TP rather than PPTP, so I had nothing to drive it on my Linux machines at home. Peter said there was a Linux client from Cisco, and he sent it to me. Of course "Linux" turns out to be actually "RedHat" (No, they are NOT synonyms folks, no matter how much RedHat wants you to think that.) The so-called Linux client won't run on Slackware or Debian apparently. So I thought I could use the Windows client and just run it under VMware. Nope, that doesn't work either, probably because their routing implementation is too primitive.
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Date: 2007-10-10 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 07:47 pm (UTC)Ah, another disgruntled victim of Behemoth Systems, Inc.
:(
no subject
Date: 2007-10-10 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-15 11:02 am (UTC)*monty python moment*
Right..no Robins, no nuthatches, there's your book.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-15 11:19 am (UTC)Of course then some other bird or a squirrel comes along and eats the seeds, but that doesn't stop the nuthatches. They just fly around all day collecting seeds and stuffing them into the treebark everywhere. They can walk down treetrunks with their heads pointing down, which looks very silly. They can also walk around on the bottoms of branches, upside down. The nuthatches make sounds like tiny car horns and old video games. They are one of my favorite birds.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-15 02:19 pm (UTC)My favourite is still the Willy Wagtail ^.^ They do some funny things, like putting their tail down fluffing themselves up and running along the ground like a mouse.