Birds Nest

Yesterday, here in the gorge, was notable for the frogs chirping away down at Lake Steve while we had a near white out from snow. Ah, spring in the South...winds gusting to 25 knots, snow piling up on the hot tub cover, and amphibians looking for love, all at the same time.

Our Creek flows out into Watts Bar Lake, one of the first TVA reservoirs built in the forties to provide power to the Oak Ridge atomic bomb project, is now home to the largest concentration of osprey nests in the country. The article I read said there were over a hundred nests. I think this is low. Ospreys have built nests on everything tall that sits anywhere near the water.

One prominent nest site is on top of the Highway 70 bridge over the Clinch/Emory river. This is an old steel beast that is way too narrow and bears the scars of vehicle encounters in hundreds of places. No doubt it needs to go, and a new one is springing up right beside it, but what will the ospreys do for a nest site when they tear it down and sell it for scrap? I love to check on the chicks progress as I drive under the steel beams the huge nest is built upon. It has to be five or six feet across. I have watched the birds haul huge sticks up into the air to add to the nest each year.

Officials claim the ospreys will be fine and will just find a new place to build their nest but I question this. There are already nests built on top of the light poles at the baseball field and the football field and just about everywhere else there's anything tall. If you tear down the old structure, how much expense can there be in just adding a new post somewhere on the new bridge for the birds to work with?

Maybe that should be an action item! How much can it cost? Are there light poles planned for the bridge anyway that could be modified? Those of us near Kingston, TN should have a mission for the Ospreys.

Humans can't eat the fish in the lake safely but the birds seem to do allright. It's the least we could do.

******

Why have to Australian papers picked up on the smoking gun, ok smoking arsenal, that has just been released from the 9-11 commission, while the American News Services seem to be stuck on the Michael Jackson trial? Kos has the whole story titled:

CONDI LIED :: CONDI LIED :: CONDI LIED

The memo has just been declassified that proves Condi, "I honor the truth!" Rice told several whoppers. I used to think the Bushistas let 9-11 happen, then I just wrote it off to magnificently executed incompetence. Now I'm not so sure:

http://Kos on Condi

Commander Rapid thinks humans are even stupider than he thought. They only have to get three things right:

Eat, Survive, Reproduce!

Two out of three is not good enough, and he fears that human survival chances are pretty slim. He is heartened, however, by the recent rumblings of the normally suicidal FundXtians as they have started talking about something called "Creation Care". The Commander doesn't care what superstitions these idiots adhere to as long as they will try to stop trying to end the world so they can go to whereever it is they think they will go.

The Commander thinks they will join him in the afterlife, washed where the water will flow somewhere downstream. It is the highest aspiration of a 1954 Studebaker, after all...a return to its primordial elements to start all over as something different this time. The Commander knows that a 1954 Studebaker is the highest achievement possible on this plane of existance and fully expects to be a worm next time.

Peace,

Steve