“I stand upon some dreadful brink, and it is utterly dark in the abyss before my feet, but whether there is any light behind me I cannot tell. For I cannot turn yet. I wait for some stroke of doom.”
— Éowyn in The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter V, “The Steward and the King”
“Headless” production begins tomorrow. Forth, and fear no darkness, you wonderful mad creators. 🙂👍
General Electric Show ‘n Tell Phono-viewer, model A-600, made on November 16th, 1964
Such a wild technology, where a phonograph record was synced with a 16mm film strip cartridge that showed the story being told on disc. A couple years later, RCA would start developing the RCA Selectavision video-on-analog-disc format that would flop spectacularly in the 1980s.
We had a version of this in our high school library learning lab, but it was cassette-tape based. More advanced versions had a BOOP audio signal on the tape that would auto advance the filmstrip. This was basically PowerPoint before personal computers.
I had a Show’N Tell. It looked just like that top one in the photo above. It was in the room I shared with my brother in the house on Hilton Avenue in Redlands, which would make me about four years old, before the first of the four divorces we lived through growing up.
The one I remember watching on it was The Count of Monte Christo, especially the image of Dantès wrapped in Faria’s burial sack sinking into the ocean.
Today’s bird walk with a friend was successful (in that we saw lots of birds, including some I don’t often see) and also unsuccessful (in that we saw several birds we could not identify).
We saw a number of waterbirds, including lots of buffleheads, a lesser scaup, a western grebe, 2 Clark’s grebes, and probably at least 3 other grebes that we couldn’t see well enough to distinguish between western and Clark’s. Also, lots of unidentified gulls and some other ducks we couldn’t identify.
Among non-water birds, we saw a huge number of western meadowlarks singing in the grass, a couple of Say’s phoebes, a black phoebe, a couple of house finches, a pair of red-winged blackbirds making a bit of a racket in the wild fennel, a Brewer’s blackbird, a couple of small birds we didn’t recognise, and one unidentified raptor.
Because raptors are both quite variable within species (with things like adult vs. juvenile and lighter morphs vs. darker morphs) and fairly similar across species (dark on top, lighter below, streaking and other patterning to make them more camouflaged), plumage characteristics are often not as helpful as one would hope. A better starting point for ID is often things like overall size and proportions, flight style, and behavior.
The brief hovering you describe narrows things down. My first guess would be an immature Red-tailed Hawk. Another possibility would be a Northern Harrier.
On your small gray and white bird, maybe Bewick’s Wren or Marsh Wren? They’re more brownish than gray, but I’m not sure how specific you’re trying to be in the color description.
On your sparrow-type bird, maybe an immature White-crowned Sparrow?
