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the nesting loons on Lake Edward
Sunday, May 4 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
It had rained on and off for much of the night and the fog had occasionally been dense. Temperatures were in the upper 50s, and, as with the rest of this particular weekend, there had been no need to start a fire in the woodstove. This morning after I'd drunk my coffee and eaten my toast and done all my morning cabin rituals, I took the dogs for a nice long walk to Lake Edward and back. This was the first time I'd been the length of the Lake Edward Trail since the winter, and there were places where it had become indistinct due to tree falls. Once we got to the mossy east shore of Lake Edward, I sat down and looked out across the water, eventually seeing the two loons who are apparently nesting there this summer. I decided to name them Ulysses and Beatrice and to use those names for the nesting loons on Lake Edward from now on. There were also a number of loudly honking geese somewhere unseen out on the water. Meanwhile the dogs were snuffling around, eventually heading northward on their own. When I started by hike back to the cabin, they weren't with me, and they didn't catch up with me even when I sat in the trail some distance up the slope calling for them. A light rain began to fall, so I figured whatever project they were working on must be engaging, since neither of them much like being out in the rain.
When I returned to the cabin, I was sweaty and weak from having done all that hiking on steep terrain with not enough in my stomach. I sat shirtless for a time until the sweat evaporated. About twenty minutes later, Charlotte returned, followed maybe ten minutes later by Neville. I gave them both pieces of matzo covered with peanut butter as a reward for coming back in a timely manner. (I had plans to drive back to Hurley today and had been a little worried they'd found a corpse to chew on and wouldn't be getting back until after dark.)
I wasn't feeling particularly motivated, but I did have one little task to complete before leaving the cabin for Hurley: to redo the improvised wires connecting the East Basement Switcher ESP8266 controller to a thermocouple measuring temperature in the hot water tank. I also wanted to get at least one data point of temperature data from that tank so I could begin figuring out what the relationship is between numbers from the thermocouple and temperatures of water inside it (a relationship that should be nearly linear). Once that was done, I cleaned up the cabin and began my drive back to Hurley.
Rain fell hard at times along the drive, creating puddles that occasionally caused me to lose a little control of the car. I decided conditions were too risky for me to drink a road beer. (If you get in an accident while drinking a road beer, that's never a good thing to have to explain.)
I got back to Hurley a little before Gretchen was to go see the movie Sinners with Nancy. She and I seemed to have resolved most of our friction over facilitated communication, with her having absorbed an anti-FC article and with me having acknowledged that there might be something to the two (and there are only two) studies (1 and 2) showing something similar to FC working for a total of nine individuals, people who may not even be conventional non-verbal autistics. (Though that might be me falling prey to a bit of a "no true Scotsman" fallacy.)
Neville on the wild east shore of Lake Edward this morning. Click to enlarge.
The nesting pair of loons ("Beatrice" and "Ulysses") near the suburban west shore of Lake Edward. Click to enlarge.
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