I was hoping that tonight’s Falcon 9 launch out of Vandenberg would be soon enough after sunset so that we would get a spectacular “jellyfish” effect. That’s when the huge cloud of turbulent gas being released by the rocket engines is high enough to still be in the light of the sun, while down below we’re in darkness already. It’s really, REALLY cool! (Like this one from December, 2017!)
Tonight – close, no cigar.
Oh, I saw the launch, it was great! Clear as a bell here, so I could follow the second stage for over five minutes as it headed toward the southern horizon, out over the San Fernando Valley:
And the video I got as it came up over the mountains to the west and climbed toward MECO (Main Engine Cut Off) was decent:
But it would be nice to get to see a couple of launches close up. Like, as close as I can get without either being arrested or pulped by the acoustic energy.
Of course, ultimately I would like a seat on the pointy end… One step at a time.
Remember the day that a HUGE red-tailed hawk swooped right past me in the front lawn and grabbed onto something in this bush that’s grown up around a support pillar in front of my front door? (Here are the pictures.) I may have figured out what it was going after.
A couple of weeks ago, after noticing some mockingbirds flying into and out of that bush more and more often, I took a closer look and found a nest in there.
Yesterday I heard a very soft peeping sound coming from there, and found at least three mockingbird chicks in there.
They’re ALL MOUTH. They must only be a day or so old because they’re blind and just running on instinct. Something comes near (i.e., me) and they pop up for a few seconds, mouths open, peeping, then hunker down and hide if no food is incoming.
When I’m getting close enough to get these pictures, rest assured that Mama Mockingbird isn’t far away and is giving me the stink eye every second. The nest is at about head height, with the gutter about four feet above. She’ll perch up there sometimes, the better to be that much closer to me so she can save time in attacking and gouging my eyes out if I make a false move. Or she’ll be out on the power line, thirty feet away, with a mouthful of food to bring back as soon as I get out of sight.
Directly above them on the inside of the roof line is the mourning dove nest, still with two fledgelings, although they’re big enough now to take off more and more often.
Welcome to the “Willett Aviary – Front Yard Edition!” Here’s a quick video of the little squeakers! And you can actually see all three!
It started with the distinctive cry of a Cooper’s Hawk in the back yard, along with the squawking of several ravens. The hawk was close, somewhere in those big pine trees on the hill behind the house. I quickly pulled up the Cornell Labs Merlin app (you need this app too!) and started an audio recording with the app identifying the birds as it hears them.
You can hear the Cooper’s Hawk at the very beginning, over the sound of the screen door closing, and again (much more clearly) at the 01:06 mark.
I had set the phone down and grabbed my camera, looking for the Cooper’s Hawk, when from behind me (at the 00:57 mark) I heard a Red-tailed Hawk, then a second one. This pair is familiar! They were close and getting closer, flying right over my head into the trees where the ongoing fight was happening.
As a helicopter goes over you can hear chirping and calls from all three hawks, as well as the ravens still harassing them. The ravens finally forced them out of the trees, the Cooper’s Hawk going down into the canyon behind us where its nest is and the Red-tailed Hawks climbing back into the thermals over Valley Circle Boulevard.
Notice the missing feathers on this hawk’s right wing. I would have thought they would have grown back by now, but it’s become an identifying mark on this particular magnificent bird, one that’s easily seen even when it’s several hundred feet in the air and a half mile or more away.
It’s been a really, REALLY wet winter, which was fantastic! Everything’s green and growing! Until it gets hot, and dry, and “everything” turns brown and highly flammable.
We aren’t quite there yet with all of the May Gray and June Gloom that I’ve been complaining about as the marine layer stays over us all day long for weeks on end. But we haven’t had a good, soaking rain in a couple of months, so we’re getting there.
As a side note, there’s a new app that I like a lot called “Watch Duty.” It goes off and sends you notifications if any brush fires pop up within the range you have set. I have mine set to all of LA County and it’s gone off a half dozen times this spring and early summer. Imagine my surprise when it beeped and vibrated this afternoon and said there was a new fire in West Hills, at an intersection that’s maybe a mile away as the crow flies…
(Image: Watch Duty)
And about two seconds later I heard ALL of the fire trucks firing up their sirens and two air dropping helicopters going over at about 500 feet.
Huh! Something’s going on, me thinks! Let’s go look!
About two acres of light brush, reported to have started at Knapp Ranch Park. The bad news is that Knapp Ranch isn’t at the top of the hill, but just a block or so up from Valley Circle Boulevard, so there are three or four streets crossing the hill north to south above it. Streets with houses on both sides. Which the fire was rapidly approaching.
LAPD and LA County Fire hit this one hard. We had at least three, maybe more, water dropping helicopters overhead in less than ten minutes. It looked like they were going to refill up in Chatsworth Reservoir, which is directly behind us compared to the fire, so we had our own little airshow going on.
We also of course had a whole fleet of fire trucks and crews converging on the area. Which blocked Valley Circle Boulevard and had a whole stream of folks cutting across to Platt and Sherman Way via Highlander, making a mess of our local side streets.
Meh, could have been a lot worse. The winds were light and while today was warmer and clear, the recent history of cloudy, cool days helped. It didn’t spread fast. It took them less than an hour to declare it contained and I never heard any reports of any houses being damaged. Although I do bet there were some homeowners immediately uphill of the fire needing a change of underwear.
I do wish that the sound quality on YouTube videos was better. On my phone you can hear all kinds of bird songs, the drone of other hummers buzzing me, dogs barking, planes goin overhead…
On this video, it’s all dulled down and dampened, like listening through it with soggy sponges stuck into your ears.
“The Ceiling That Dripped Blood!” (Oh, wait, that one was an owl. It was only after we got rid of the owl that the raccoons moved in, and we never got rid of the raccoons.)
And on and on. Just search for “raccoon,” a few dozen more pop up.
But that was at the old house. We’ve now been here, up on top of a freakishly steep hill and I have only seen a raccoon once or twice, even though we’re only a mile away from the old place.
First of all, I was astonished to see in this morning’s news that last night’s thunderstorms that moved from the Antelope Valley into Pasadena caused a major disruption to the Cruel World Festival going on at the Rose Bowl. Cruel World features artists from the punk and alternative days of the 70’s and 80’s, the sort of music you can hear on SiriusXM Channel 33. The sort of music you hear me listening to ALL DAY LONG.
The Pasadena Fire Department ordered the show cut off in the middle of Iggy Pop’s segment, and headliner Siouxsie Sioux’s segment got cancelled altogether. It was her first (and only!) North American appearance in something like 15 years.
Today was the second day of the Festival and they got some more rain, but no reports of lighting and apparently the show went on.
Weird weather!
Meanwhile, out in the back yard, I was trying to get a bit of down time to do some reading. A group of mockingbirds (at least three, maybe as many as four or five) had other ideas. They were flitting in and out of the big tree and it was unclear if they were fighting, mating, building nests, or all of the above, but they were definitely LOUD!
(This was an amazing, astonishing, fantastic, {insert thesaurus here} event. I’m giving you the full-resolution photos – click on any of them to blow them up to download or look at the complete image.)
You can usually find hawks floating around the neighborhood. Red-tail hawks are the common ones, but you also find red-shouldered hawks, Cooper’s hawks, and some kind of “night hawk” that I hear often but haven’t yet been able to ID. We’re adjacent to some large natural, open areas, but even over the more densely populated areas of the city, there are often hawks.
Glorious, spectacular creatures. Usually observed from a considerable distance.
This morning I went out to pick up the first of the trash cans after I got payroll done. (Working from home for more than three years is still a mixed bag.) I saw a big red-tailed hawk just landing on top of this big Italian Cypress tree across the street. (It might also be an Emerald Green Arborvitae, but I digress.) I grabbed the camera and took a few pictures.
Unlike most of the times I see these hawks, this guy wasn’t going anywhere, so I had time to cross the street, walk down the cul-de-sac, and get a bit closer.
Of course, what I really, really wanted to get some photos of him flying, but Murphy’s Law ruled and said that he would take off and fly away when I was walking and had the camera down. *sigh*
A couple hours later, when I went out to get the other trash cans, I saw him circling fairly low overhead and I ran in to get the camera again. That opportunity had passed, but he was just landing in that same tree again.
Again he sat for a minute, then to my amazement he leapt into the air. I started shooting one picture after another.
I think it was about this point that I realized that he wasn’t going to soar around and circle overhead, but was diving. FAST!
Straight. At. Me.
Ten feet away from me? Maybe? Less? I could hear the air whistling through his feathers. I had no idea what was going on, but he went by me, then landed in the bush that surrounds the pole on our front porch, right next to the front door.
I wonder if there wasn’t something in that bush that he was after. One of the bigger lizards? A rat or mouse? A bird’s nest of some sort? I know there are some house finch nests up under the eaves, just like in the back yard (search this site for “finch,” plenty of photos) but I don’t know of anything in that bush.
He gave me the hairy eyeball. I wasn’t doing anything other than shooting photos. Okay, there was that whole drooling thing since my jaw was on the ground…
Look at those claws!
Look at that glorious plumage and the patterns in all of those feathers!
Look at that glorious red tail! And he’s gone, soaring in ground effect about knee height, passing right past me on the other side, again no more than ten feet away.
GOBSMACKED!!!
But wait. After a couple minutes to regain my wits, I remembered that there’s a security camera that looks at the front porch.
Good. It really happened.
My thought at the time was that the hawk might be building a nest in the area, possibly at the top of that tree, and that it had seen me looking at it repeatedly and saw me as a threat. Maybe. But having now seen the pictures and how it was looking into that bush, I’m leaning more toward the idea that it was looking for something in that bush for lunch and I happened to be in the way.
They were filling the sky when I was getting home with groceries.
In an interesting follow up to yesterday’s post, the red-tailed hawks were out as well. (This may again have something to do with why the ravens were carrying on.) I couldn’t see the hawks, but I could hear them – that cry that you hear in the soundtrack of every movie ever made showing the American West. Then, about 30 seconds after this video was finshed, I heard one again, much closer, and spotted one of them diving out of the sun. The cloud of ravens had shifted off a half-block or so down into the canyon, but there were one or two stragglers off by themselves…
*BOOM* Just a cloud of black feathers where the raven and hawk’s paths had intersected.
I don’t know if it was the hawk that had been injured yesterday by the mobbing of the raven pack, and it almost certainly wasn’t the raven who did it (I’m assuming), but the Wheel of Life took another turn right there!
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 