Yup, still busy . . . but, I want to give a glimpse of a few things coming up. Meaning, these are photos that will appear in future posts (with others, of course). For instance, bugs . . .

I have a ton of hummingbird videos and photos . . . I’ll need to decide what and how much I want to share, but whatever it will be, it will look something like this . . .

The above gallery has a disproportionate number of photos of male hummingbirds. The Ruby-throated males are the first ones to leave for the migration to South America, so the vast majority of birds at the feeders are females — squabbling females.

I presume the above males are actually travelers from up North and passing through. I mean, there are a few males at the feeders, but they are juveniles.

I hesitate to even mention this, but for the first time ever, I found a dead hummingbird on the feeder. I did not examine it too closely (I don’t like to handle dead birds or any dead animals, for that matter), but I could see blood and a wound on its chest. The bird was not caught on anything; it was just laying there, and I can only surmise one thing — a deadly encounter between hummingbirds. I know they are cute, but I’ve seen them go at each other and seen feathers fly. Anyway, I’m still sad about it and the discovery greatly lessens my enjoyment of watching their antics. For them who didn’t know, hummingbirds do fight to the death, although not usually outside of mating season. (LINK)

One thing that’s different this year from past years is the number of birds at the Crab Orchard Refuge. Tons and tons of birds . . . because they dropped the level of the lake by about 3-4 feet so they could repair a spillway, exposing a lot of shallow bottom areas which are now covered in vegetation and reducing the surface area of the water.

That has concentrated the fish in smaller areas, and the place is lined with egrets, herons, cormorants, seagulls, and other birds. In fact, we just saw a large flock of pelicans standing on a sandbank. many more than I’ve seen here before.

Anyway, what I want to say is, photos-a-plenty-a-coming.

In other stuff, I happened to cross paths with one of my Project 313 posts.

A few quick words about my projects . . . there are more than are listed in the header menu (I need to clean up the blog and organize some older posts a bit better), but Project 313 was one of my favorite efforts.

You can read about the project HERE<<link but, basically, each post had one photo, one cartoon, and one doodle (doodles were all created by me on the phone using various drawing programs), and there were 313 consecutive daily posts. I’m surprised how much writing I used to do for many of the posts. The last sixty or so were a bit skimpy of writing because we were in the process of moving back to the mainland.

Yes, all the photos, cartoons, and doodles are collected in two summary posts; one at the halfway mark (LINK) and one at the end (LINK). Be aware those two posts will load slowly due to the number of photos, cartoons, and doodles. I wouldn’t even try it unless one has a decent Internet connection.

Anyway, post No. 147 (LINK) was written three years ago this month . . . and I found what I wrote then prescient and pertinent to our current situation. Of course, I imagined worse, but what we have is bad enough.

A few days after that post (actually, the same day because I was writing posts ahead of publication), I wrote about something else that seems to be now coming to a head (LINK). The thing is, I thought it was bad three years ago . . . but all it took is one tiny virus to make things much worse and more surreal.

I can honestly say that, anymore, I hardly recognize my country. Democrats are falling over themselves trying to push every cockamamie social theory they can find — and some they made up whole-cloth, and Republicans are borrowing the Taliban’s playbook, and neither side any longer even pretends they have any respect for the Constitution or the rule of law.

And the people? Well, they look like people, but I’m wondering alien body-snatchers are controlling them. That, or they’ve lost their collective minds.

I just read interesting articles regarding what I call critical thinking. They call it “need for cognition” (LINK to the Wikipedia definition). Basically, the propensity in people to engage in what they called “deep” thinking. Meaning, how likely are people to “want” to think critically about what they read and hear?

It turns out that it’s not very likely. Note, critical thinking isn’t linked or correlated to intelligence. It has a slight correlation, but the propensity to engage in critical thinking is irrespective of intelligence as measured by IQ tests or levels of education. Across the board, that metric has dropped significantly over the last ten years.

Meaning, if people hear — for example — that taking a horse dewormer is a good idea, their response is more likely to be “yeah; that sounds right” — thus avoiding having to think and work things out — than “wait; does that make sense?” which would necessitate having to think, evaluate, and possibly inform oneself on the way to forming an opinion.

And, guess what? Them people, the ones who prefer not to “deep think”, see it as a positive trait. Literally, they are proud of their mistrust of pertinent data.

. . . all that religious indoctrination must paying off . . .

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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