So you think your 10-megapixel camera gets the details? David Bergman made a 1,474-megapixel picture of the inauguration scene. You can zoom in and zoom around and try to find who was yawning during Barak’s speech. (I couldn’t find any, but there are plenty of really, really cold people). Bergman says he discovered Yo Yo Ma taking a picture on his iphone. I didn’t see that, but it was kind of neat to find the San Francisco Boys and Girls Choruses. Check it out by clicking the link below the picture.

David Bergman’s Inauguration Photo

Full-screen version (even better)

So much chicken news this week…

I noticed earlier this week that Lily was eyeing me as her rooster. What does that mean, you ask? (Or maybe you really don’t want to know.) All of our chickens will occasionally crouch and spread their wings when they see me coming. I thought for the longest time that they thought I was some predator swooping in. No, instead it turns out they just wanted a little chicken love. I give their rumps a little shake and, satisfied, they ruffle their feathers and go on their way.  That’s just what Lily, who’s about 8 months old, has started doing.

So today was the day when she settled into the nest and produced her first egg. Since she’s an Ameraucana chicken, her eggs are lovely greenish shade. Sometimes the egg will cause great consternation, lengthy lays and yelling afterwards. Not ladylike Lily…she was in the nest, stayed a short time, and went downstairs to have lunch.

Here’s a slideshow of a few pictures.

By the way, the two chickens that had been in trouble this week are doing much better. One is headed to complete recovery (Rowena), the other, Jeanelle, we’re still crossing our fingers on.

My desk looks out onto the backyard so I get an ever-changing view with my morning coffee. Today a couple of ducks who decided to come for a swim in the pool. I wish I was a quicker photographer so I could have gotten more interesting pictures for you, but here are a few. The picture of the pair was blurry, so I decided to make it even more so as to look “arty”. The funny picture I didn’t get is when they caught sight of one of the chickens and swam down to the end of the pool for a closer look. Their heads bobbed and necks craned as they tried to get a better view. Then they found something delicious in the lawn and settled in for a morning snack.

[as always, click a picture to see it bigger. click again to make it go away]

It’s been a challenging time here animal-wise, what with our dog Zack having cancer, one of the chickens sick from something, and now last night, a late-night attack in the henhouse. I did my usual morning check of the nest area and noticed that there was a major fracas since there were a lot feathers everywhere and some of the stuff I keep in there was knocked all over the place. It didn’t concern me all that much because that will happen when the girls flap around, jostling for positions on the roost.

But then, we found this by the door of the henhouse:

(As always, click on a picture to see it larger.  Click again to dismiss it.)

Luckily the chicken to whom those feathers belong, Rowena – a Cuckoo Maran that lays dark brown eggs, was up and about.

I took her inside and cleaned up the bloody parts, dressed them with ointment and gave her some antibiotics. Of the three places she was hit, one is particularly bad. I have to admit it made me kinda of queasy when I realized the skin had been broken and I smelled, of all things, fresh chicken meat! (I should add our chickens are not for meat, just eggs and amusement.) It’s pretty bad looking:

Even though the chicken run and the henhouse are pretty well fenced, it’s obvious they weren’t enough last night. The girls are going to have to be completely locked in their house for a while.

We’re thinking that a raccoon or possum came in around 2am (because that’s when I heard Zack bark and our neighbor heard commotion). Rowena was sleeping by the ramp and got grabbed by the predator and dragged downstairs. That’s why there weren’t feathers from  Lily or Rubella, the other birds. Rowena is one tough chicken and she managed to escape. And thank goodness the ill one, Jeanelle who is weak from what ails her, was in our house for the night.

As long as that nasty wound heals and doesn’t become infected, we think she should be alright.

You just never know, do you….

As a backyard poultry fellow, I know that chicken health is not affected by cold weather until it really gets and stays well below freezing. Where we live, we’ll get several nights of temperatures in the mid- to upper-20s which is nothing to worry about. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think about keeping them a little warmer if possible so I whipped up this easy heater that I read about in Backyard Poultry magazine. (There’s a slight benefit in mitigating the fact that egg production plummets with freezing weather.)

What you need:

• a flower pot
• a pot saucer large enough to the top of the flower pot
• another saucer that will just fit over the bottom snugly
• an old lightbulb base
• a low-wattage bulb, 15-25w. (compact fluorescents won’t generate enough heat)
• optionally some gravel to help with light leakage
• an electric timer

Some pictures follow (click to see ‘em larger):

I set the timer to go on at sunset and off at sunrise. It seems to keep the henhouse 5 degrees warmer. Coupled with the natural insulation of the henhouse, the temperature is about 10 degrees above what it is outside when the weather is freezing. Not bad.

As part of our renovation of the front yard away from lawn and towards more food production, Tom had built a lovely berry fence out of 4x4s and copper pipe. Today we planted some of the plunder brought home from a nursery yesterday. Basically just sticks, they’ll grow to be cane berries, in this case Olallieberries, a Purple Raspberry and “Amity” red raspberry.

New to me: when you plan a BART trip online, not only will the site tell you the time (very approximate since it’s BART after all), the cost of the fare, but also the carbon savings achieved by not driving your car to make the trip.

So when I looked up a schedule between here in the Diablo Valley and Civic Center in San Francisco, in the lower right hand area of the page, in somewhat small print, it told me the trip on BART would save emission of 28.3 pounds of carbon dioxide versus driving my car. Pretty good.

Not content to just leave it at that, I took a look at how they’re calculating that number. It turns out to be this formula:

(Distance travelled divided by your Miles per Gallon)
multiplied by (pounds of CO2 emitted by burning one gallon of fuel)

The EPA says the CO2 cost of one gallon of gas is 19.4 pounds. A weighted average fuel efficiency for all cars and light trucks in the US is 20.3 mpg. So:

29.6 mile trip/20.3 avg mpg * 19.4 lbs CO2 per gallon of gas
= 28.3 pounds of emitted carbon dioxide

Now since I can’t help boasting about my hybrid car once in a while, I redid the calculation for my particular car. I keep meticulous fueling records, so I can tell you that over the past 12 months, my car’s average fuel efficiency is 50.4 mpg (actually on this particular trip it’s usual even higher).

So for this 29.6 miles BART TRIP, if I drove instead, my carbon cost, driving alone, would be 11.4 pounds of CO2.

This is an interesting way to demonstrate how fuel efficiency affects CO2 output.

BART – Carbon Calculator

New to me, this webpage from  March 08 has pictures of sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, and always bizarre sculpted food. They have several besides the one below of an egg shell transformed into a baby carriage carrying its yolk, which manages to be both amusing and disturbing at once.

A google search reveals that a lot of people have this unusual hobby. Here’s another one I really liked: frogview

More pictures to look at:

• Wacky Archives
• frogview

We were out at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco yesterday to see what was commonly thought to be the next-to-last day of an exhibit of some drawings from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. That meant we stood in line for close to an hour which also meant that we had time to leisurely observe the rooms which we normally rush through and that I had plenty of time to fiddle with the controls on my camera. Even though the ISO is pushed too high, I liked the way this one turned out. The painting is “Portrait of a Young Man with a Green Book” by an anonymous painter in the 16th century.

If you’re interested, the Da Vinci notebook drawings will still be on view for a few more days. Call the museum for the exact closing date. Amazing stuff…

FAMSF: Legion of Honor