|
|
|
a husk of phoebe hatchlings
Wednesday, August 28 2024
Our cleaning lady showed up extra early today, but left early too, around 1:00pm, overlapping with a professional glass installer by a few minutes. While I was waiting for the latter, I decided to sit in the garage with the door open. I was sitting in a camp chair I'd taken frpm Creekside on my last visit to Virginia. As I sat there, I happened to look up at the phoebe nest above the outdoor garage light. That's when I saw a gruesome sight: the mummified remains of several hatchlings that looked to have merged into some sort of husk that had been partially dislodged from the nest. How could this have happened? My guess is that the two days of roofing that had happened back in early June had made it impossible for parent phoebes to attend to their nest. So the hatchlings had starved to death and then mummified in the abandoned nest. It's sad, and is cautionary tale to those who undertake tasks like logging operations or other deeply-disrupting activies in nesting season.
The glass installer was from a company called ArrowGlass. Gretchen had originally arranged with Safelite to have them do the job for about $570. But on the morning they were supposed to do it, they suddenly realized they didn't have the piece they needed, the hatch glass for a Chevy Bolt, in stock. A couple days had then passed and then they came back to Gretchen with a new price: over $1000, and a replacement date near the middle of September. By then, though, I'd contacted ArrowGlass and had agreed to a price of $465. This afternoon, the ArrowGlass guy only took about 45 minutes to do the job. It looked great, though it lacked a Chevy logo. (I have the old Chevy logo, though, on one of our cars that's valuable real estate for stickers evangelizing veganism or abortion access.)
The only real problem with the replacement was that it didn't completely eliminated the many cubes of broken glass from the old window, which had fallen into the inside of the hatch. I could hear them rattling around in there every time I raised and lowered the hatch, and occasionally a few would fall out through the hatch locking mechanism. That didn't seem like a good thing. So I popped the flimsy plastic inner-lining from the hatch and used a vacuum cleaner to suck what I could out of its insides. But there were only a few pieces I could reach this way. They were in some deeper void, coming from there only sparingly, and usually only after wild swings of the hatch. It was like trying to get water out of a tire found in a trash heap. The most pieces seemed to dislodge when I closed the hatch violently. But then sometimes cubes of glass would fall in around the latching mechanism and it then wouldn't unlatch until I hit the hardware with a hammer to rattle the cubes into some other arrangement. In so doing, though, I definitely reduced the amount of glass in the hatch. But then when I went to put the flimsly plastic inner-lining back on, I was up against those stupid plastic rivets that are universally used these days to "secure" such things. As tried and tried to get the rivets to align with their holes, I cried out to nobody in particular, "who designs these things?" I know the rivets are used partially because they can be completely hidden. But I would much rather the attachment points were screws that I could see. It's best when how things are assembled and disassembled can be known at a glance.
After that was taken care of, I applied lots of insect repellant and took the dogs for a walk up the Farm Road and then homeward at the top of the escarpment to the west. Neville came this time, and the weather was so hot that both he and Charlotte wallowed in the swamp east of the Farm Road (recent rains have recharged its pools). After that, I mowed the lawn for the first time in weeks.
Later this evening, Nancy came over with the dogs Jack and Hurricane and her 17 year old nephew Sven. They all went for a big walk with Gretchen and our dogs despite the vicious clouds of mosquitoes.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240828 feedback
previous | next |
