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Daily Observations

Gulls

It was a busy day and I have felt like I am fighting off a cold, so I did not spend too much time outside today.

Weather: It was light before six this morning, but I think the first time I looked out the window was a little after six. The skies were clear and there was frost on the ground. I still felt like I was fighting off a cold, so I opted to go back to sleep. When I went to class around 8am, there was not a cloud in the sky that I could see. In the distance near the horizon, I could see a marine layer of fog. Winds were calm. By 9am, there were some clouds in the sky, and they increased through lunch time when it was partly cloudy with winds out of the west. By this evening, there were only a few clouds in the sky again. Forecast for tomorrow is mostly cloudy with a 20% chance of rain. That’s similar to what the forecast has been all week, however.

Birds: It seemed rather quiet out this morning. It’s possible that I slept through most of the birds calling, but I am pretty confident that the flicker did not drum on the house. There were a couple of things I noticed in particular today. Around noon there was a large flock of gulls circling about high overhead. They dispersed after a few minutes but I think there were well over 100 of them up there. The other thing I noticed was a particularly vocal chickadee when I was walking home around 5pm. I first saw it in the pine trees near the west entrance of Rasmusson. It was giving a “chicka-chicka-dee-dee” call with only slight variations and momentary pauses. As I watched it, it flew over to the spruce trees at the bottom of Hillcrest Drive and continued calling. At one point it did stop calling long enough to bend down and pull something off the branch it was standing on (I assume an insect it ate), but then it quickly resumed calling. I could not see anything that would be making it upset, especially as it moved around and kept calling.

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