A Happy, Wet, Windy Day

So far, the wild storm we were supposed to get today, April 7th, is mostly just wet. It's a good excuse to stay indoors and make ice cream and custard... and identify animals on Zooniverse! I started a new project there a few days ago but had to give it up because the videos were not clear enough on my computer to tell what things were. It's a good project, identifying what animals in the Peruvian Amazon are ingesting oil from the many oil spills in the jungle. The indigenous people living there are trying to save the jungle and animals they depend on. They need documentation that this project will provide.

But I found another project I can see okay, Canid Camera, and I know the animals! It's in a forest in New York and I lived in New York and know the eastern animals pretty well. But I'm still doing Numbat Discovery, too, the Western Australia project. And today when I went back to it from the Canid Camera (love the name), a Numbat was waiting for me! Researchers can identify individual Numbats by their stripes. Here is the whole sequence of video frames I'm given, starting with the first uncropped frame. Isn't it a beautiful little creature?

Now you get to see it up close, with all those lovely stripes that are unique to that individual, or so I understand... I'll have to go back to my photos of the others I have seen on Numbat Discovery and see if I can tell them apart... and if they *are* different individuals.

While I'm playing on the computer, Johnny is in California, enjoying sunshine and the grandkids at Wonder Valley Resort. Steve and Munazza are attending a Qi Gong retreat there. Johnny is the nanny for the kids while their parents are in the sessions. Or maybe Kestrel and Cedrus are Grandpa's caregivers! Munazza sent me this photo on their first day there.

Besides Zooniverse, I made custard and ice cream, since we are in a swimming-in-milk phase. I planned to make cheese but Johnny broke my cheese thermometer awhile back and I had neglected to buy a new one. So I ordered one yesterday. Eager to make Mozzarella again!

The next day, Sunday, was wet and windy here, too, so I had more fun on Zooniverse. Finally saw a good video capture of a Tammar Wallaby, with the white line from eye to mouth. This one also has a tattered ear. Will be interesting to see if this particular tattered-ear Wallaby appears again.

And now it's Wednesday, with Monday spent at the coast doing my beached bird survey... in beautiful, dry weather. Too many beached (dead) birds for my liking but also some lovely patterns in the sand, thanks to the high waves from the weekend's storm.

All the beached birds I found were in the Petrel family, either Northern Fulmars or Sooty Shearwaters, seabirds no doubt caught in the weekend storm. Through these surveys, COASST, the sponsoring group, maintains a baseline for what is "normal" on each beach for each month of the year. When there is an abnormal number of beached birds, they look for the causes. If an oil spill or other human-caused die-off occurs, they can prove it. A few years go there was a die-off caused by "The Blob", a patch of unusually warm water that hung around off the coast for several years and caused massive starvation of Cassin's Auklets, who couldn't find their usual food supply. Johnny and I were surveying a different beach during that die-off and got very tired of counting and tagging little blue-footed auklets.

Tuesday was feed and errand day in town. Today, Wednesday, it is raining steadily again so I am writing this blog, making more hummingbird nectar... and more ice cream. You can never have too much ice cream. And I am identifying more critters for Zooniverse. In other words, I'm avoiding housework.

Johnny is still in California, enjoying warm weather and a leisure life, spent mostly, it sounds like, walking back and forth to the dining hall and watching Kestrel and Cedrus bounce on a trampoline. Hopefully, there will be photos to post when he returns. And, maybe, he will bring some of that warm, dry, California weather back with him.