Tag: robins

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Ashley with her snout in the greenery on our patio

Steven commented while he was visiting on how much fun vole-watching on my patio was.

Ashley thinks so too.

Ashley has caught three voles that I know of (because she was on-leash when she caught them). She may have caught some others on the patio when she was out there off-leash.

One thing that surprised me, because it is so different from our boxers when I was young, was how gentle her mouth is.

Our boxers would promptly dispatch whatever they caught—groundhogs, even raccoons. One shake of the boxer’s head and whatever it had captured in its powerful jaws was dead.

That is not Ashley’s modus operandi. Two of the voles that Ashley captured were released unharmed, after I told Ashley “drop it.” (The third got eaten before I got organized to tell Ashley not to.)

In addition to the three voles, Ashley has caught both one (rather stupid) squirrel, and one (rather immature) robin fledgling. Both of those were released unharmed as well.

I’m not quite sure why. I know some retrievers have very soft mouths, so they can bring back a dead fowl without ruining it. Maybe there’s a gene for that, and Ashley has it? Or maybe it’s just that she was rewarded repeatedly for being very gentle when she took treats from people’s hands?

Whatever it is, I like both aspects of my li’l pupper: truly a mighty hunter, but also a gentle one.

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Jackie and I went for our first bike ride of the year. We followed our traditional first-ride route, around Kaufman Lake, past the Olympic Monument, around Parkland College, and then back. This year we went 6.27 miles.

I’d been hearing cardinals for several days, but out on this ride we got definitive expressions of bird spring. The robins are back, as are the red-winged blackbirds. I saw a crow fly up out of Copper Slough with a huge wad of nesting material in its beak.

The ride itself went fine as well. No mechanical problems. No problems with Jackie’s wrist. There had been a couple of previous days when it would have been warm enough to ride, but those days were very windy. It was nice to just wait for today and not have to deal with the headwinds.

I think we’re all set now, to be able to ride whenever we want. In particular, if there’s a day when it’s nice enough to ride first thing in the morning, we could ride to the Fitness Center and then to taiji. (That’s a bit long and complex of a ride to try to combine it with our first “shakedown” ride of the year.)