Barnswallows' return

The barnswallows are back. Considering the placement of the nest, I assume that it has to be the same ones as last year. I've been taking a few pictures.

Belize: Caye Caulker and Snorkling

(This is part 5 of a 6-part description of a trip I took to Belize with friends just after Thanksgiving 2008. I put my pictures a flickr.)

Wednesday morning started with another speedboat pickup from Searious Tours. They took us and several other tourists back to the Searious pier where we piled onto a catamaran. There were ten of us on the tour with two crewmembers. We headed out toward a popular snorkling spot just inside the barrier reef. I'd never been snorkling before, so I didn't know what to expect, but this turned out to be my favorite part of the whole trip. The water was only twenty or thirty feet deep, and it was teeming with fish. We even saw a few stingrays and a couple of moray eels. The fish would swim almost right up to me: I guess they get lots of practice sharing the water with snorklers. We probably got to spend the better part of an hour in the water at this spot.

After another short run on the catamaran, we found ourselves at what the crew called "Shark Ray Alley." As the name suggests, it's an area frequented by predators. One of the crew (Daniel) jumped in and caught a nurse shark. Daniel said that the animals are used to him, and they just swim right up to him. The shark was about four feet long, and it just sat patiently in Daniel's arms while we touched it. Its skin was courser than I would have guessed. After we'd all checked out the shark, Daniel released it and grabbed a stingray, which had a much smoother skin. Anyway, the underwater petting zoo was pretty cool.

Back on the catamaran, we sailed south to the island of Caye Caulker, with plenty of Bob Marley, Belikin, and rum punch along the way. The crewmembers jokingly described Caye Caulker as a drinking village with a fishing problem. We had a delicious lunch of ceviche and fish burritos, followed by a little shopping.

The return trip was straight into the wind (and seemed to narrowly avoid some bad weather), so the crew had to rely on the two outboard motors. Back at Xanadu, we made sandwiches for dinner and again fell into bed pretty early, most of us nursing sunburns.

Belize: Arrival

(This is part 1 of a 6-part description of a trip I took to Belize with friends just after Thanksgiving 2008. I put my pictures a flickr.)

Two friends of mine (L and KL) and I flew to Houston on Thanksgiving where we were met by two other friends (K and H). We spent the night there and then got up the next morning and took a Continental jet to the Belize City International Airport. After going through immigration and customs, we stepped outside and were met by David, one of the managers at Pook's Hill Lodge. Pook's is a great place in the jungle of the Cayo District, far away from any population centers.

David packed us and our stuff into a van, and we headed westward on the Western Highway. After about an hour, we stopped at a restaurant called Amigos and had a delicious lunch of stewed chicken, rice and beans, and Belikin beer. Due to import restrictions, Belikin is about the only beer you can get in Belize--fortunately it's very good.

After lunch we went to the Belize Zoo, which features howler monkeys, spider monkeys, owls, tapirs (which were quite a bit bigger than I expected), otters, coatis, a puma (also larger than I expected), a pair of HUGE crocodiles, a couple of jaguars, and some really foul-smelling wild pigs called peccaries. I didn't get many good pictures, but I got a short movie of one of the jaguars (he came right up to the fence).



Another hour on the Western Highway brought us to Teakettle Village. We took a monstrously bumpy dirt road for about a half an hour, and then we arrived at Pook's Hill Lodge, where we spent the next three days.

Sunday at/before ZendCon

I'm at ZendCon this week. I flew in to San Jose airport yesterday and got the hotel shuttle to the hotel (which is in Santa Clara). I got in pretty early (around 10AM local time), but my room was already ready, so I got to go straight in.

A bit later I took the hotel shuttle to the Santa Clara Convention Center, which is where the conference is being held. Conference check-in only took a few minutes (I gave them my name, and they gave me my conference packet), so I had the rest of the afternoon play.

I had the hotel shuttle take me to the local CalTrain station, and I took that into San Francisco. I was wanting to go to Pier 39 (a touristy shopping area with Bay cruises and an aquarium), but I had a terrible time finding the right bus. The nice woman who answered the Pier 39 phone number told me to take the 9x bus. As far as I can tell, that particular bus runs approximately once every two weeks. I only ever saw one 9x bus, and it was going the wrong way. I almost gave up a couple of times and just took the train back early.

I eventually got to Pier 39 (I caught the 10 bus, which runs fairly regularly, and which got me to within a block of the pier), but I didn't have much time there (I needed to get back to the train station by 7PM for the return to Santa Clara). But the pier offers a nice view of the Bay, and I took several pictures. I could see Alcatraz Island, and there was a neat view of the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. Some of the other shorelines were wrapped in a neat fog, and seeing the sea lions was cool.

I got back to the hotel and had some dinner in the hotel restaurant. By then I was pretty tired (I didn't sleep much the night before, and the time change added an extra two hours to the day), so I turned in a bit early.

barn swallows: alive and well

Today I saw the four fledgelings perched on a nearby railing. Their parents still bring them food.

When I got home last night, two of them were perched on a door frame near where the nest used to be.

barn swallows: moving on

When I left for work this morning, the nest appeared to be empty--I didn't even see Stoopy lurking in it. I guess they were all off doing...well, whatever barn swallows do (eat insects and make poop, I suppose).

When I got home from work, I saw that the painters had taken down the nest so that they could paint the entryway. Lame, but at least they waited until the hatchlings had become fledgelings. If that was a deliberate decision, it was a nice one.

This evening as I left for a bike ride, the entire crew swooped past me single file through the entryway, as if to say "hello" (or perhaps "oh god it's a human fly away as fast as you can"--it's a subtle difference). And when I came back, one of the fledgelings was perched on the doorframe close to where the nest used to be.

So I guess they'll be OK. It was nice having them as neighbors for a while.

fledgeling barn swallows

Maybe they hatched earlier than I thought, because a couple of them were flying a bit today.

When I came home from work, one of them was perched on a rail about 30 feet away from the nest.

Another one was fluttering around a bit near my doorway. He didn't seem comfortable going too far, but he was able to hover and then land on the nest. (That was pretty cool to see.)

A third one was staying in the nest. That one holds his (her?) wings a bit funny--up higher closer to his head. It almost makes him look like an old man with a stoop. I'm wondering if that one is healthy.

When one of the parents came to bring food, Stoopy was the only one I saw stick his head out of the nest. So I can't account for one of the hatchlings. I looked around a bit but didn't find the fourth anywhere nearby on the ground.

Update: I just stepped outside to have a look, and all four hatchlings are back in the nest. They're big enough now that it's pretty crowded.

barn swallows; bigger and bolder

They're painting my building, so each day I fear that I'll come home to find that the painters have "evicted" the hatchlings (which they probably wouldn't survive). But they were still there again today.

It amazes me how much they've grown in just over a week. wikipedia says that barn swallows fledge (I believe that more-or-less means "leave the nest") after about 18-23 days, so they've got another week or two.

barn swallows

About a month ago I started noticing a bird's nest attached to the wall near the door to my apartment. I'd occasionally see a couple of small, orange-and-black birds coming and going. Because of something that happened a couple of days ago, I wanted to find out what kind of birds they were.

A Web search directed me to whatbird.com. This site has a pretty cool search feature allowing you to enter certain characteristics of a bird (size, color, tail shape, etc.), and it'll help you figure out what kind of bird it is. Turns out that my neighbors are barn swallows.

The thing that happened earlier in the week is that their eggs hatched. So now I have about four other new neighbors. I took a few pictures and posted some of the better ones to my flickr account:

Dallas World Acquarium

Friends and I went to Dallas recently to see The Police in concert (great show). We also checked out the Dallas World Acquarium. I took several pictures, most of which didn't come out very well. But here are a couple of pretty good ones.

This first one may be hard to understand out of context. There's a large pool with rays and a shark, and there's a plexiglass tunnel along the floor of this pool. You can walk through the tunnel and see the shark and rays (although the distortion is pretty bad). You can also (from an upper level) look down into the pool and see the tunnel. This picture is looking down into the pool while the shark is swimming over the tunnel:



And here's a penguin, because penguins are awesome:



The DWA also has a black jaguar. Beautiful animal. So if you've got a couple of hours to kill in Dallas, hit the DWA.