Virtue is its own reward

[jhetley]

Decided to do the bike ride this evening rather than tomorrow, due to a chancy forecast. (Yes, I _do_ remember cursing the false weather prophets and their goat entrails, but even a broke clock is right twice a day. A metaphor that will soon lose all meaning, with digital timepieces everywhere....)

Anyway, out by the airport in the same place I saw that melanistic woodchuck a few days back, I came upon a crow poking at something on the pavement. Except that, when I got closer, that shadow against the evening sun turned into a Cooper's Hawk that got into a huff and flew off with his dinner. _Then_ I realized that what I had taken for poplar fuzz blowing across the pavement was actually down plucked from the mourning dove corpse.

My wife pronounced the death of one mourning dove to be a good start. They coo a _lot_, early in the morning, right outside our windows.

And the spellcheck doesn't believe in "melanistic."

14.9 miles, 59:10

Comments

[persimmon.livejournal.com]

Mourning doves have to be among the world's stupidest creatures. Last year, there were a pair of them trying to make a nest on a light-coloured repair patch to the road. They got quite confused and indignant every time a car drove over it ...

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a mourning dove, all right. One time I built a fence around one with hunting arrows.

(That was back when I was a mass-murderer.)