Titmouse and Friend

We were sorry to bid farewell to Rick and Meg this morning after a very nice visit. OilMan said even the plumbing emergency was entertaining...in retrospect, after the repair was successfully completed and they no longer worried that they had inadvertently turned a small problem into a big one! Will came by at 7am to say goodbye before he went to work at the golf course and found us all sitting up under the arbor watching the sun come out.

The rest of the day has been very quiet as we spent a good portion of it catching up with the Tour de France. The young American rider Lawson Craddock has ridden in the back of the peloton for almost the whole race, but that is a remarkable story in itself as he sustained a broken shoulder blade and a deep cut over his eye in a fall on the first day. 

The race is never without controversy. This year the French crowd has booed Chris Froome over a disqualification and reinstatement after he was found to have over the limit of an asthma drug. He is asthmatic and the drug was probably epinephrine, a steroid. Niebali a rider who was riding all day near the head of the race on Thursday had to abandon yesterday after he was knocked off his bike by a spectator's camera strap which caught on his brake lever. He finished the stage but was unable to continue because of a cracked vertebra. 

All of these stories within one brutally difficult race through the French countryside. Who wouldn't be hooked on 'le Tour'?

I spent an hour or so on the porch watching the action at the bird feeders and took a lot of pictures of grosbeaks, acorn woodpeckers, bluejays, finches, creepers and this lone titmouse eyeing his metal counterpart which makes up the finial on top of the pole which holds the feeders. All of a sudden every bird vanished as a coopers hawk flew in and surveyed the scene from an oak branch.

I wouldn't like to see it catch any birds lured here by our feeders, but I certainly wouldn't mind if it snapped up a few ground squirrels....