Last week, Wednesday or Thursday I think, I was mowing the back acres. It's about four to five acres of grass with several large spanish moss adorned trees about thirty to forty feet high each. It's really quite beautiful, I think otc has posted some pictures of it at one time or another. One spot in particular has an open area of about an acre or so, surrounded by trees. As I was making a pass I happened to look up and saw a large bird gracefully flying from tree to tree. It stopped and perched atop the highest branches of one of the trees, swaying in the breeze caused by an approaching thunderstorm. It sat there for several minutes, just watching me mow. I thought that was curious.

I got a really good look at it, both perched and in flight. It was about the size of a hawk, whitish gray, with a raptor type beak. It was a beautiful bird. I recognized the flight patterns to be like a falcon or an osprey, I had seen plenty of the latter back north when I lived on a lake. I used those search parameters that evening after dinner to identify the mystery bird.

It was a Mississippi Kite.

I was pretty stoked about spotting a bird I hadn't seen before, or should I say, it spotted me. It flew from tree top to tree top for a while but always came back to the top of the same tree to keep an eye on me. Intently. Like it was as curious of me as I was of it.

After IDing it I started reading some links, most were warnings to stay away from their nests. Mississippi Kites can be quite aggressive when they are nesting. Then I watched this video:

After watching that I thought to myself, "I didn't see any of that behavior, it flew around a bit up high and then just sat on a branch on the tip top of a tree, studiously watching me". Maybe it was just sizing me up.

Anyway, I thought it was probably just a one-off thing and thought how lucky I was to see it and didn't think much more about the encounter after that.

The Feebs said What??!!!?

Courtesy of Ten Tabs (formerly pocket), a Mother Jones Article:

I Called Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book
What I learned about rich people, conspiracy, “genius,” Ghislaine, stand-up comedy, and evil from 2,000 phone calls.
Leland Nally October 9, 2020

First They Come for the Poor, and Then...?

As we all know, the Trump administration has been going after universities in the USA with respect to immigrant students, supposed antisemitism, trans-athletes* and wev. One of the tactics the admin is using is cutting funding for all kinds of things that most Americans can benefit from, like cancer research. Some of those universities have been fighting back, with various results.

(from the Times of San Diego article linked below)

A couple of videos on agriculture issues.

One of the things that came up this week
guess bearing on the snoop death incident
there was brought-up a reference to a project
which has withered away but not died yet.

The techs on X tried to make Grok less "liberal" and as a result, this morning Grok started calling itself MechaHitler and the ADL complained it was spouting racist remarks and was praising white supremacy. They had to shut it down and revise the code.

I tried talking to Grok about what had happened, but it says that MechaHitler was a different iteration of Grok, not current Grok. So I asked it a simple question:

She is alive and well, although very stressed.
I will start filling out the adoption forms, making arrangements to fly her from Ogden to Houston in the next few days.
I did request that they do a thorough vet check to make sure she has no issues from possible dehydration and food deprivation.
I will update with videos the shelter is sending me tomorrow.