Pecking Order

Interesting that bird watching made this particular list although the last part certainly applies. This quote felt a little personal to me since I do dance, I try to write a bit here and I’ve always been into feeding birds. Actually, its a clean sweep because I enjoy messing around in the kitchen.

You can learn a lot by watching the birds. I never knew that red bellied woodpeckers were so aggressive. I thought blue jays were aggressive but the jays don’t want to mess with the woodpeckers. They’ll sit to the side waiting their turn when one is on the feeder.

Sometimes, a smaller bird will try to hide on the other side of the cylinder down low. They usually get a couple of seeds out before the woodpecker sees them and chases them away. Guess when you’ve got a drill for a bill, the other birds stay out of your way.

Shown above is a Northern Flicker. They are bigger than the red bellied and their coloration and pattern are very striking. For the longest time, we would see them in the trees but rarely at the feeder but this year, there is at least one who has figured out that there is easy pickings at the feeders. We saw one on a feeder designed for smaller birds but it turns out that the Flicker can use it tongue to get into smaller spaces and pick up the seed pieces. I guess they eat ants in the wild this way so it was an adaptation.

I gave a few ‘rona facts and figures on Sunday and there is some further evidence that the Sun Belt peak is over. Today was the third day in a row that the number of new cases was significantly below where it has been. There’s a typical pattern in the data that Sunday and Monday are the lowest days and then the new cases rise over the week until Friday. Today was higher than yesterday but still far below this time last week. This looks to be the lowest three day total since July 5-7.

We still have a significant number of cases and too many places having over 1000 new cases per day. Long way to go but if the big states are actually starting to drop, then that is potentially good news.

Then I’ll leave with one note from outside the US. Here is a graph showing new cases per day for Colombia which jumped both Iran and the UK to now have the 9th most cases in the world.

Now I can’t speak intelligently on control measures in Colombia. I have no idea what, if any, lock downs or quarantines were used. I don’t know how much social distancing goes on. I don’t know how many people wear masks.

But I’m really starting to wonder how much of that really matters. With places like Australia and Japan seeing second spikes, it just seems like the ‘rona is going to run until it burns itself out. The pattern of growth is just too similar from place to place. The lock downs and such just seem to delay things. If you could isolate yourself from the rest of the world forever, then it might work. That just really isn’t possible anymore.

Unfortunately, since we likely won’t know the real truth, it will be easy for everyone to make up their own story of what contained the spread. Well that’s enough about that for now.