Mike Bowler

I wrote last week about an osprey nest that we discovered up on top of the power lines. Chris Celsie sent me a link to this article that explains some of the history behind these nests.


This is a great collaboration between the power company and a group of volunteers focused on saving these amazing birds.

There is a new blog reading service called Illumio that is extremely badly behaved. Their service is hitting this blog three times a second on average and has used over FOUR GIG of my bandwidth this month pulling RSS feeds.

I'm not amused. If this continues, I'll have to block their ip.

I've sent an email to their support address but perhaps a rant here will make it back to them first. It appears that they starting hitting the blog last month but it's only this month that they've used enough of my bandwidth that I'm starting to get warnings from my ISP.

UPDATE: The CEO of Illumio has personally contacted me to apologize for this and to tell me they're working to fix the issue. This makes me feel quite a bit more positive about their company. I'm still annoyed by the fact that it happened at all but this is clearly a mistake that they're trying to fix. I'll give them points for that.

UPDATE 2: The issue is fixed and I'm impressed by how rapidly and professionally the problem was dealt with.

We took the back roads on the way home from my cousins farm tonight and discovered this contraption built on top of the power lines. At the top was a large nest with two birds of prey inside. At the time we didn't know what they were although they looked a bit like hawks. We looked them up in a bird book when we got home and are now pretty sure that they were ospreys.

When we first stopped the car to take pictures, one of the birds took off with some prey in its talons. It looked like a fish but it was hard to be sure. The other bird flew above us for a bit presumably to see if we were a threat. It seemed to decide that we weren't so it flew back to the nest.

We're wondering who would have built this contraption and if it's there specifically for the osprey or if they've just taken over. There were no other contraptions like this on any of the other power line poles so we're guessing that it was there for the birds.

More pictures here.

We moved out to the country last September so this is our first summer in the new house. The previous owners had planted a ton of pretty flowers that we just haven't been able to identify yet like this one pictured here.

I've been taking lots of pictures and putting them on my flickr photostream and have been marking those we don't recognize as "unidentified flower". If you know what they are, please leave a comment on the picture. Many of these are absolutely gorgeous and we'd like to know what they are.

We're slowly looking them up ourselves but any help would certainly be appreciated