Capesummer

Balcony Birds No. 6. This one was exciting. We’re almost positive this is a juvenile Rufous-Breasted Sparrowhawk. It makes sense that it would be coming around here trying to murder our sparrows. These kinds of hawks are built for manoeuvrability - they can zip between the branches at speed to surprise perching birds. Aparna spotted this through the window and I was lucky enough to grab some hand-held, unstabilised pics - and got a few decently sharp ones. Lightroom could only partially compensate for the heavy purple fringing due to the older teleconverter dealing with the intense contrast against the sky. ...

These ones are greater flamingoes - although their pink beaks are underwater. Almost a retro-80s, vapour-wave kinda thing going on with the colour scheme and the ripple patterns.

The strange, Plutonian flowers that @withoutaleaf’s ma left us before they moved back to India - years ago now - have begun to bloom and it’s going to be a bumper year. This is especially enjoyable given my indifferent gardening. It’s still sunny out there so I propped up a sketch pad as a reflector to ease the contrast.

Spoiled Boi got a comfy spot provided under my morning balcony coffee chair. Taking a load off those big paws.

Balcony Birds No. 5. I used to be confused about what this was. It’s not a turtle dove. It’s a red-eyed dove - cunningly named after a feature that’s really difficult to spot with the naked eye. The easier way to tell is that they’re much larger than the Cape Turtle Dove, which is really quite a little thing. The Red-Eyed Dove is almost pigeon sized. It also has a pinky shade to its head and breast while the turtle dove is… dove-grey. They really are lovely, gentle things. Even if they’re not exactly geniuses.

An odd pic of me that @johnthevudio found from 2003.

Skitten has made the rocking chair by the bedroom window its own perfect bed. It even uses my old Tanzanian blanket as a pillow.

Remember kids, when you buy your hiking boots, choose with the idea that you might still be wearing them as many years in the future as you’ve been alive to that point. Reducing and reusing are better than recycling.

@furiousgreencloud and I climbed up a stairway up the side of this old barn after dark and watched the lightning reveal the distant mountains by lighting them up from behind while the warm wind ripped around us.

Meme-tastic. Memes are thoughts that propagate - funny images are just one example. Before Richard Dawkins became a general troll and dickhead, he was a brilliant biologist who changed our understanding by noting that genes seek to propagate - not organisms, which are merely the vessels for those genes. He also hypothesised that human ideas could propagate in a way completely analogous to biological evolution - with ideas simply sticking around because they had the right properties to propagate rather than because they were particularly useful. The term, ‘memes’ was coined to describe these units of idea that could stick and propagate. These little piles of stones seem a pretty fine example to me. Someone made a first one and then…