PixlBit

Those sticks all come from trees. The male will fly to a dead limb or stick and grab hold with his talons and then just take off. It's a pretty awesome thing to watch. He then flies back to the nest site and places it on the nest. When the female comes back, she may rearrange some of the sticks if she doesn't like where the male put them. Sometimes all they do is add another layer to the nest if it survived the winter, which is what the pair by the salt marsh did (the osprey in the pic is from that pair). Sometimes the nest gets blown down by a winter storm and they have to do a complete rebuild, which is what the pair on the island (our showcase pair) had to do this year. The male arrived back on March 31st, and had the thing rebuilt within ten to fourteen days. He's very industrious.

I've got one of the FC3 consoles. The controllers are pretty flimsy, but it does OK. That's how I've been playing the few NES games I have.

Ryan, I so completely understand what you're saying. It's also a game that the experience can change dramatically from one play-through to the next. I played it the evening it released, and then again the next morning. The first time was completely different than the second time. My first play-through, there were lots of other wanderers that I interacted with, but the second time, I traveled with the same person for the whole game. This is also the first game I have ever gone out of my way to get the sound track for. Pretty much answers the "are games art?" debate as far as I'm concerned.

I had thirteen people I was worrying about, so happy all of them are ok. One was there to cheer on the runners from the running club up here and saw/felt the blast. She and Vicky (the nurse) were the only two really near the explosions. Most of the others had already finished and left the vicinity.

A bunch of my runner friends were down there in the marathon, as well as the brother and sister-in-law of one of my best friends. All are ok. Friend's sister-in-law is a registered nurse, finished between the two blasts, and immediately headed into the crowd to see what she could do to help.

You want my not-so-humble opinion? This is the work of a home-grown nutjob like Timothy McVeigh.

Peepers are such a rite of spring around here, sometimes I forget that there are people who don't know what they sound like. As for the salamander, I love those little guys! Northern red-backs lay eggs in moist areas, like under leaves and in rotting trees on the ground. A lot of other salamanders need vernal pools, like frogs and toads do, to mate and lay eggs.

According to Colleen, the entomologist who released the beetles, it may take ten years to see a difference.

It didn't come out very well, but because you asked nicely:

The helmet has two long pieces of plastic tbing coming off it, supposed to be antennae, and the shirt had white spots on the back. But like I said, it didn't come out very well.

I don't thenk the adelgids are beetles, but I don't know, because they're so small I can't see them. The predator beetles we just released are only about the size of a pinhead, and they're large compared to the adelgids. OK, I just looked up pics of the adelgids, and they look kinda like lice. Eeewww!

The adelgids are just the tip of the iceberg up here. We've banned all out-of-state firewood in hopes to try and keep emerald ash borers out, but they've been found an hour or so from the Maine border in New Hampshire. The other really nasty one is the Asian long-horned beetle. One of our biggest industries in Maine is forest products (otherwise known as trees), and these bugs can kill entire forests in a short time.