April 22 – Earth Day.
Very little birding this weekend. Today was cool and very windy. Spring migrants are showing up around the area but there is no point in trying to find them in gale force winds. We decided to knock off enough other things that we can play hooky for birding when the weather is better.
Yesterday we were walking a property for Mid-Michigan Land Conservancy. I do the baseline documentation which means marking boundaries and doing species lists. On the property we got two new species, house wren and yellow-bellied sapsucker. That puts our joint count at 181 for the year. This is day113 of the year so our daily average is 1.6 species per day. That is 0.041 per hour and 0.0007 per minute. Nothing spectacular but we are on track for our target.
Part of this little adventure is to get us out exploring. We are looking for birds but other things too. Like places with good food or local culture. Highly coveted are those places with good coffee. Good birding and good coffee seem to go hand in hand. Actually, everything seems better with a good shot of the black death in hand. According to Lise, I’m held together by caffeine. Like my heart can’t keeping beating without the occasional caffeine kick.
So we just had an interesting coffee experience here at home. Lise has had major headaches the past couple days. Even her costly miracle migraine cure pills were not helping. Then she realized she had mistakenly replenished our coffee container with decaf, not regular coffee. Once she had a cup of high test in her bloodstream the headaches magically disappeared. What’s odd is that I wasn’t affected by the lack of liquid productivity. Probably because I could load up at other places. Going down to Beaners or Espresso Royale is part of my daily work ritual. I just had to be able to drag myself out of the house. Anyway, we are back to caffeinated and all is well with the world. The incident reminded me of a few great Dilbert cartoons.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 