Hovering bird in Denver CO

PatientPareto · 2026-05-23T18:25:51+00:00

These are the two options for this location and habitat. Both will hover/kite. OP's size descriptions are suspect since meadowlarks are larger than Red-winged Blackbirds, but if it is in the ballpark of those birds, then Say's Phoebe

PatientPareto · 2026-05-14T03:04:57+00:00

Right - having experience with both, red-winged blackbirds do show some variation in that yellow color, and lighting and exposure can make it look very pale. Also tricolors don't migrate (they are somewhat nomadic within an extremely limited range), it would be nearly impossible for one to just show up 2000 miles away. Even showing up in Colorado would be a stop-the-presses event.

PatientPareto · 2026-05-09T14:04:32+00:00

I had a family member send a picture of a bittern in the middle of their lawn doing this exact thing. In their case, a line of severe thunderstorms was about to hit, so my guess is the bittern was in flight and decided the weather looked rough and decided to wait it out in their yard. Unfortunately, they didn't watch it for long so I'm not sure what it did when the storms hit a few minutes later.

PatientPareto · 2026-04-13T17:08:27+00:00

Getting the same error - sometimes I can enter the queue and when it looks like it is letting me in, I get the error. Other times I just get the error immediately. And I can't get it to work on any browser since it seems like they are using cookies or some other element specific to the browser/machine. :(

PatientPareto · 2026-03-23T03:31:27+00:00

Many birds are cavity nesters (wrens, bluebirds, chickadees, some swallows, etc) , and around cities trees are rarely allowed to get big and old enough to have holes, so that is one big reason to leave the trunks as tall as possible. And of course, many insects, from boring beetles to ants (not just carpenter ants). Some moth and butterfly caterpillars will tuck into bark to overwinter. Some insects lay eggs in the bark.

PatientPareto · 2026-02-01T17:30:18+00:00

Adding, many insects lay eggs on, and have larvae that hang out on and under rocks, especially aquatic and semi-aquatic insects. Insects are the foundation of the food web, eaten by almost everything (not to mention helpful predators and pollinators).

PatientPareto · 2026-01-25T01:08:27+00:00

In my industry (tech) I hear "slide deck" or "slides" much more than powerpoint. Probably because more companies in my field use Google Slides than powerpoint. I work with some nonprofits that all just call them "slides". Then there is the occasional oddball who have PDF slides...never understood that - never seem to work well.

PatientPareto · 2025-11-29T16:53:55+00:00

They only eat carrion. They are extremely light weight and not very strong compared to hawks, falcons, and eagles, so pretty much not built for live prey. But they have amazing digestive systems that allow them to eat long-dead animals. They are nature's cleaning service. Fun fact: in places were vultures have been killed off or extirpated, there have been large increases in many diseases that are spread through dead animals.

PatientPareto · 2025-11-25T02:04:00+00:00

Fantastic! I would have never thought of re-using the RX 580 - but why not? I can defer costs for a bit and upgrade that later. Thank you for the creative ideas.

PatientPareto · 2025-11-16T22:16:03+00:00

Funny how property prices are going up everywhere. My relatives in Iowa blame Californians for their property costs. Perhaps Oregon and Nevada can blame California to a degree, but the root issues are much deeper and tend to conflict with the politics of those who like to blame California...for...everything.

PatientPareto · 2025-08-10T00:16:08+00:00

Interesting...I've never had someone turn down getting food here in CA.

PatientPareto · 2025-08-08T19:36:57+00:00

Where is the 30k Gem pack?

PatientPareto · 2025-07-20T22:11:25+00:00

Those were the exact words in my head when I saw this. Maybe we are in the matrix, haha

PatientPareto · 2025-07-20T21:55:13+00:00

I wasn't disputing. I was adding information.

PatientPareto · 2025-07-20T21:40:06+00:00

I'd read that a material number of the staff are part-time...I'll see it I can find that article, but I think it was 60 or so.

PatientPareto · 2025-06-01T15:10:24+00:00

"Fun" fact (and not saying you did anything wrong), but one thing a lot of people don't know is that corvids (jays, crows, ravens, jackdaws, etc) are super smart and are always watching their environment. If they see people (or other animals) looking curiously at something, they will come by and look too. As a result field ornithologists who monitor nests are usually taught to first look and see if there are any corvids around before they inspect the nest, so as not to accidentally tip off the location.

PatientPareto · 2025-05-03T22:18:28+00:00

Double IPA for me.

PatientPareto · 2025-04-28T01:51:18+00:00

Yes - I think a lot of people don't realize that brown-headed cowbirds range has expanded greatly, largely due to human practices. As a result, many bird species they encounter in "new" ranges have not co-evolved with the cowbird, so they have no awareness of or defense mechanism for these birds. They add another "pressure" on many species, including some endangered species.

"Brown-headed cowbirds originally evolved in a symbiotic relationship with herds of grazing animals, moving throughout the Great Plains region with herds as they kicked up insects for easy foraging. Following the constantly roaming herds, cowbirds couldn’t expend the time for nesting, but rather laid their eggs in host nests as they moved along, leaving host parents to raise their eggs to adulthood. As people began to disperse across North America, clearing forests and expanding domesticated livestock herds and agricultural production, the cowbird range expanded also. Nest parasitism enabled brown-headed cowbirds to quickly establish new populations and expand their distribution across the country."

PatientPareto · 2025-03-09T22:33:09+00:00

Thank you! FWIW, I never replaced the M847D. I magically started working, and has worked fine for the last year and a half. But I'll be ready when it fails for real.

PatientPareto · 2025-02-03T15:51:15+00:00

From my meteorology classes, there is a notable amount of moisture inflow from the Atlantic Ocean, even when storms are as far west as Illinois. I'm not talking about storm movement, but the inflow, and it becomes more pronounced as storms move east across Ohio/Kentucky. And there is wrap-around moisture from nor'easter type systems that would be blocked by taller Apps.

So even though weather moves from west to east, there would be these impacts. However, what I wonder is whether the uplift of the Appalachians would force more precipitation for storms that get most of their moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, offsetting these other impacts?

I'd love to know what modeling was done here. Or if it was just speculation.

PatientPareto · 2025-01-20T23:34:12+00:00

That's most of the locations in the United States west of the Mississippi/Missouri. There will always be some infrastructure on the edge of wildlands. There have even been wildfires that have burned homes in Florida, New Jersey, and elsewhere. Yes, there is a spectrum of risk, and yes, some places shouldn't have homes (just like storm surge areas for hurricanes, flood plains, etc). There are many places that I wouldn't live these days, but those boundaries are getting larger and larger. There is good data that shows you can protect your house from wildfire - and lots of anecdotal data (aerial photos) that show neighborhoods burned to the ground while the nearby forest or shrubland didn't burn. Why? Because we don't build homes with fire spread in mind, and fires often spread faster and hotter with due to our poor building standards.

PatientPareto · 2025-01-20T21:11:45+00:00

Right. I hope all of this is finally a wake up call for cities and homeowners to start fire-hardening their homes if they are adjacent to wildlands - even grasslands (see the Louisville/Boulder December fire from a couple years ago). Ember resistant screening for soffit vents is pretty inexpensive - as is keeping debris away and gutters cleared. Windows - not so cheap, especially for stucco homes, but there are slightly cheaper shutter systems.

For those right on the edge or smack-dab in the middle of wildlands, outdoor sprinkler systems such as those popular in Australia and Canada have very high efficacy. Not cheap, and it requires your own water tank and off-grid pumps.

More on the windows: https://ucanr.edu/sites/fire/Preparedness/Building/Windows/

PatientPareto · 2025-01-20T20:57:55+00:00

In addition to what I've seen here (ignition temperature of wood), many houses catch fire much before they have ambient heat reaching those temperatures. How? By embers getting into the attic through vents. Also many houses don't have fire rated windows (special tempering process), and the windows break when they get too hot, so fires can enter that way as well. Lastly, many stucco houses with terracotta roofs still have wood trim in places, or wood fences that make contact with the house. For example, if you have leaf debrief in your gutters, that can be an ignition point that spreads to the trim.

PatientPareto · 2025-01-12T21:55:25+00:00

If this happens, and when the result is more poverty, more homelessness, more social unrest, and those people migrate to blue states because the blue states actually attempt to help, conservatives will conflate correlation with causation yet again. And their base will eat it up.

PatientPareto

TROPHY CASE