@Daenerys

I miss your bird photographs. I am looking forward to warmer weather coming there soon.

Wow, I've been mentioned twice in two different posts today! I feel so loved.

Here's an Instagram-ed photo of some cupcakes I made for a Valentine's Day order:

I don't remember the name of the filter I used, but I like it.
It's gotten cold and windy here again and I've been too busy to go out birding anywhere. Hopefully next week the weather will even out more.

Love the NZ photos. If I ever manage to travel there I want to go to the Waitamo Glow worm caves. I'm pretty sure they were the inspiration for Blackreach in Skyrim. Have you ever been there?

I love shoebills too. They are so prehistoric; of course they would sound like a dinosaur!

@snoopydawg Your rock does look like Snoopy!

@boriscleto
All wild bird counts are dropping in my area and many others.
Our winters have been warming with extreme, short lived cold snaps and unusually small snow amounts.
And most don't notice.

I don't have feeders setup where I'm living now, so I went to the nature center.

We never had Pine Siskins in the yard anyway. Even a 'green morph'.

@dystopian

Nicely done. Good to see you again.

The Shoebill was long called Shoebill Stork but I think recent DNA work showed it clearly was not a stork. I'd have to look it up but Pelicans might have been the near neighbor.

Here is a Great Kiskadee that was here in town at the park for a couple days early in Feb. It is a big sub-tropical flyctcher which dives into water for fish as well.

This is a Red-shouldererd Hawk on the yard fence, prolly Cotton Rat hunting.

One of my favorites, Scissor-tailed Flyctcher. Note how tail is held crossed, like scissors. They have a spectacular display flight in which the climb high straight up screaming all the way and loop over completely upside down doing a full 360 and gliding back down.

Thanks all for all the great posts.

@k9disc

Both of you are. Thanks so much for sharing this. It put a big smile on my face. Tell us more about your dawg. Name.. breed, I'm thinking border collie. If yes I've seen them working at herding cows during a roundup I went on in Idaho. Amazing dawgs.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYXsaOcJweo]

Disc dog freestyle tricks resolve in predictable ways. I call this "the Release", as in,"So how is the dog releasing from the Flip?".

This is pretty standard in interior work, all the competent handlers read the dog and move to Intercept the Release and to facilitate flow. The thing is, competent handlers do it, but don't have it conceptualized or put into a ruleset.

In larger scale tricks, longer throws, this idea of Intercepting the Release is practically non-existent. Handler throws, usually directly out in front of the handler (12 o clock), and then waits for the dog to hustle on back or moves to pick up additional discs to be prepared for the next sequence.

Intercepting the Release on the larger scale moves, within Flatwork(the movement stuff between the throws and catches) creates amazing flow and truly dynamic sequences.

Vaulting on the run is a real dicey skill normally, it's pretty hard to line up and time. Not anymore.

Here's another with Epic:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keDwgeWbOPs]

Anyway, wanted to share something fun and interesting this Friday. Tough week.