Bird Song of the Day
Brown Thrasher, Rondeau PP–South Point Trail East, Chatham-Kent, Ontario, Canada. Sounds like a highway in the background, or a waterfall, but the bird is quite virtuousic. (This is the old-fashioned kind where the birder puts the metadata at the end of the tape, verbally.)
It occurred to me that dead birds falling from the sky would be one good leading indicator of bird flu, and then that such data could and should be crowd-sourced, so I went to look for it, and found dbird.com, fit for purpose, but oriented toward collisions (as with airplanes or glass buildings), not dead birds as such. There were 6480 reports in 2024.
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Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From dogwood:
Dogwood writes: “A Puffball Mushroom in our back yard.” Looks like an alien sphere.
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Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. Material here is Lambert’s, and does not express the views of the Naked Capitalism site. If you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldn’t see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for three or four days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals:
Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated:
If you hate PayPal, you can email me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, and I will give you directions on how to send a check. Thank you!
