We went down to the woods this afternoon, and I managed to get a better picture of the new baby peewee and the sibling egg. I used a mirror to reflect the view from above the nest to the camera. And more good news… For the first time since Momma started sitting, we saw the peewee papa bird. No pictures yet, but at least he’s being a good family man.
Here’s an enlarged detail from the same picture:
The San Luis Blues Baseball team is having a fireworks show after their game on Monday, July 3rd. I’ve been here for 33 years and don’t recall a show in town before.
Their website says “SLO’s biggest Fireworks show in 50 years!!!”
Maybe those fireworks I witnessed a few weeks ago were test shots.
Our momma western wood peewee had a hatchling today. My wife was the first to spy it on the peewee cam.
Tonight I stared at the webcam to catch Momma feeding the little one. It’s amazing how long she is gone from the nest catching bugs (peewees are insectivores) and how little time it takes to feed the chick.
It doesn’t help that it’s dusk here now, and, even with the remote controlled nest light activated, I only had one shot at grabbing a picture. The frame rate was about 1 per second.
So, here’s a blurry Mum stuffing the gob of the newborn chick with some savory bugs. I hope they were mosquitoes.
Minus the choppy video coverage on KCOY Channel 12’s web site, these might be the first photos on the Internet of tonight’s Delta IV launch from Vandenberg AFB, about 50 miles from here.
The delays tonight might have made it a little more spectacular, with the sun setting lower in the sky compared to the original launch time.
I even managed to catch the boosters falling away. I saw them first with binoculars, rotating and flashing in the sunlight. I shot this blind, unable to see them in the video viewfinder in my camera. The rocket is upper left, the boosters lower right.
ATMOSPHERIC CONDITION:
Current southeasterly winds aloft will continue to bring subtropical moisture and mid to high-level clouds from Mexico through Wednesday. Doppler Radar is currently indicating a line of thunderstorms over the Southern California Bight moving northwestward towards San Luis Obispo County. This in combination with surface heating will provide the potential for rain showers and thunderstorms late this afternoon through this evening. Most of the rain will evaporate during its decent (virga) due to dry air at lower levels of the atmosphere, but lightning can still develop and the associated fires that it may trigger.
Combined with these mid to high-level clouds will be a deepening the marine layer along our coastline which will continue through Thursday. This condition will also produce a cooling trend for the inland areas.
The weather pattern will change again as a weak trough moves inland to the north on Thursday producing increasing northwesterly winds on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. This condition should mix out the marine layer during the afternoon hours giving normal coastal temperatures and mostly clear weather.
Here are a few more pictures from yesterday’s hike.
Indian pink along the trail before the first bridge and the cache.
I haven’t IDed this sage yet. The flower head is about the size of a quarter.
And this clay mariposa lily is blooming along our street.
Today for Date Day, Katie and I went for a short hike in the Irish Hills Natural Reserve. We went up the Bog Thistle Trail, checked on the SLOweather geocache, and then back down to the parking area via the Mariposa Trail, and checked out the wildflowers in bloom along the way.
On the way up, there was a lot of poison oak right along the trail. I’m glad we didn’t take the dogs, as they would have spread it everywhere, on us and in the truck, before we could have gotten them home to bathe them.
At the geocache, we checked the cache container,
and added some things. The log shows 20 people have found it since we placed it on 11 Dec 2005, and there are 9 shots left in the camera (8, now. Katie took my picture to test it.)
Right around the area of the cache, there are trail-namesake bog thistles.
According to the sign,
the plants are perennial and only bloom after growing for several years. Seeing one in bloom was pretty interesting.
Also right at the seep around the cache, serpentine columbines were in bloom.
Farther up the trail, the San Luis Obispo Mariposa Lilies were in bloom,
After we made the turn back downhill from the Bog Thistle trail onto the Mariposa trail, we found some club-haired mairposa lilies in the shade
and, farther down the hill, some globe lilies.
As we were heading back down the road to the parking area, this butterfly led the way for quite some time. Thanks to Beteljuice from Dudley, West Midlands, UK, I now know that this is a Buckeye butterfly.
The calochortus obispoensis up here are finally blooming. They’re one of the most interesting looking flowers I’ve ever seen. In the past I’ve seen them in flower across the canyon in the Irish Hills Natural Reserve at the same time they bloom here, so if you want to see them in person, now would be a good time for a hike.
Fire season is here and the SLOweather streaming audio fire scanner is back. Right now we are in the final testing and setup phase, with one receiver scanning mainly SLO County Fire, SLO County CDF , and the Los Padres National Forest. Because of their high percentge of medical calls, we usually leave SLO City fire out of the scan unless there is a major fire incident.
The stream’s comparatively low bit rate and use of ShoutCast servers tends to make for a large audio buffer. This means that if you listen to a live scanner and our feed at the same time, our audio will be delayed by up to a minute or so.
Most audio players (WinAmp preferred) should stream this MP3 stream.
POCKET PC USERS: If you have a wireless Pocket PC PDA, you can use GSplayer and these instructions from About.com to turn it into a SLOweather scanner.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
When there are no incidents being handled, there won’t be anything to hear. This isn’t like AM/FM radio.
Because of the nature of scanning receivers, it’s entirely possible to miss radio traffic on one channel because the radio is scanning or locked on another channel.
We’re still wringing out the system, working on the antenna, and the channel lineup. Availability may be limited.
If you have any comments, please use our contact form to email us.
Wendesday, June 21st, is the first day of summer. It arrives here at 5:26 AM PDT. The days have been getting longer since the winter solstice last december, and now they will start to get shorter again.