Karen's Aura

Karen connects with critters.  Encountering virtually any pooch during her frequent walks, it will "melt" in her presence.  She constantly hears "Grizz," or whatever the usually wary or shy dog's name is, "never does that for anyone.  Never!"  Karen's an "animal whisperer" and their 6th sense "reads" it.  That's why she gets such natural photos of everything from bears to slugs to, well, greater yellowlegs.

And so, during a recent outing, Karen heard a racket.  The source: a raucous handful of crows, the creaky door-hinge screech of a bald eagle and frantic alarm cries from two greater yellowlegs, a shorebird that nests in our local muskegs.  Aha, thought Karen, a photo op.  

Slogging towards the sound through the muskeg she discovered the three vocal species in trees bordering a small pond while three naive fledgling yellowlegs set about their daily chores among the sedges surrounding the pond.  This scenario's natural progression might have been the eagle would swoop down to kidnap one of the young yellowlegs.  With dinner secure in the eagle's talons, the crows would charge forth in a well orchestrated attempt to appropriate the raptor's feast for their own dining pleasure while the adult yellowlegs vocalized extreme displeasure as they pursued in a futile rescue mission. 

But a guardian angel arrived to change the narrative.  And that angel, Karen, had neared the yellowlegs family.  In such situations frantic yellowlegs, being vigorous defenders of their nests and fledglings, dive bomb to within inches of we humans with incessant no trespassing warnings that make us duck or perhaps consider donning a World War I helmet for safety.  Always.

Instead, these adult yellowlegs quieted down, surveying the action from trees as the crows and eagles lingered in "theirs."  Somehow those extremely protective shore birds sensed Karen was an ally.  I can be the distance of three end to end football fields (with the end zones tacked on) from a yellowlegs nest or chick and I'm going to be under siege.

Karen stealthily inched forward to where she could clearly see the entire family.  Reaching perhaps the length of a bowling alley from the birds, she sank down into the muskeg with sundew practically towering above her, and paused.  Wait a minute!  There are no bowling alleys in muskegs or football fields nor can Karen hide behind a sundew plant.  Sorry about that!

There she waited next to the yellowlegs brood while no warning calls, no threatening dive bombing -- just silence prevailed.  Soon one of the birds waded towards Karen and the frustrated predators exited stage left while Karen, now adopted by the family, seemed no more threatening than a blueberry. 

Karen writes, "It was an experience I will never forget, watching the interactions of three fledglings splash with great abandon, water droplets flying everywhere.  They dunked their whole body under and bobbed to the surface, only to repeat, shimmering in the golden sunlight, paddling close to one another while the third bird preened and closed it's eyes." 

Yes Karen's "aura" once again reigned and something that "never happens," happened -- or doesn't it?  Today she reflects on the time when a mother hoary marmot on a wild ridge in the Yukon left Karen to babysit her playful pups while mama scampered off to another ridge to gather "hay."   But, that's another story.

The pond

A watchful parent

There's no way Karen can hide behind this long leaf sundew!

Is this what pecking order means?

That lady looks pretty funny from this point of view

A bird needs to be careful when stretching because...

A lesson in health care:  Remember that blade of sedge from the last photo?

Wait a minute!  How can a bird have such long legs?

Better look again.

Bath time.  Karen wanted to join in.

Is this nap time or are "we" preening?

Or could this be nap time with the ultimate feather pillow?

What!  Is this fledgling scratching with it's wing?

And so we'll end with this image of two innocents that 

never knew how their Guardian Angel saved them.

End of the Age of Innocence

We were officially welcomed to the New Age by an algorithm.  No humans are necessary in this new world.  For several days I had been deleting admonishments from some outfit I had never heard of called Meta -- that I was supposed to do something with a number Mr. Meta sent. Having been repeatedly warned about scams, there was no way I was going to respond to this Meta guy.  I deleted all of them as they arrived.  But on the last one, just as it faded from my computer screen I noticed something about accessing Facebook from Houston and then it was gone.  Ooh, what was that about?  Better check our Facebook page, maybe change the password.

Too late!  It turns out we had been booted from Facebook for “not following their community standards.”  What?  Maybe three months before I had posted some photos of birds Karen had taken on a local birders website.  That’s it.  Period!  Oh my, Facebook has weird standards — or — had we been hacked?

OK, just to be safe, I attempted to change our password and appealed getting booted off. Mr. Meta only responded that that I could appeal.  Wait — that’s what I was doing.  So I appealed once more and again, Mr. Meta informed I could appeal. I soon discovered after more attempts with the identical result, when you correspond with Facebook you aren’t dealing with a living being — only an algorithm.  Welcome to the New Age.

And if a Facebook algorithm decides you’re guilty, you are guilty.  End of discussion.  For a month the algorithm advised me that I had 30 days to appeal.  So I wrote a heartfelt description of the sum of Karen’s and my mostly inactivity on Facebook in modern history and sent it off.  It was so heartfelt I was sure it would bring tears to Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes.  Immediately the algorithm responded that I needed to condense my protest into the words which it supplied: “appeal decision” and press enter.   Mr. Zuckerberg wasn’t interested in my reasons.  If I didn’t hear back, his algorithm judged me guilty with no further appeal process.  An internet search suggested ways to find a real human that must be on Facebook’s payroll, but each one lead to the same algorithm.  A hacker had shot me out of the proverbial saddle and I can’t even ride a horse.

But, I’ve digressed from my intent in this blog.  Within a couple of days, an email, perhaps related to the above described hack, arrived.  Someone wanted what amounted to millions of dollars from me in bitcoins in exchange for removing something from the internet.  Nonsense of course, but wait — to prove it was real, the hacker provided the password for our email account — a password which I had just changed two days earlier when we realized our Facebook account had been hacked.  Whoa.  Somebody was seriously into our internet presence.  He also claimed to have all sorts of bogus info and pictures of Karen and me that didn’t exist.  However, knowing how pictures can be altered on computers, that didn’t matter.  My body could be made to look like a donkey in a clown suit and some people would believe it.   

I deleted the email without even reading the entire thing.

From that day on, internet life became somewhat of a time-consuming enemy to be reckoned with on a daily basis.  First I began changing our passwords and removed the list of them I kept on our computers.  We took our computers to Homeport Electronics (the good guys in my tales of woe) to be checked for malware and viruses.  Clean — except for the fingerprints on the screen.

It seems we’re getting scam and phishing emails on a more frequent basis including on my cell phone. Now they feel more invasive, more dangerous.  I notice they seem to be more cleverly disguised and now most are coming on our cell phone.

So, here we are.  In the past year someone supposedly got our credit card, took out a $200 loan at an ATM in Petersburg and the bank claims it has no record of it while our credit card company claims it’s real and the tab’s on us.

We have cell phone service with Tracfone and when I thought I was signing up for automatic renewal on our iPhone, the ad was for a second plan so I ended up getting billed for two phone plans when Karen hadn’t made a dozen calls in five months.  Tracfone refused to refund our money.  Can’t wait for our one year contract with them to end.  I’m still working on that one.

The internet, with email and formerly, Facebook, that lets us keep in touch so easily with friends and family has taken on a sinister shadow.  We mourn the loss of the age of innocence in our daily lives.   

The lesson should be, get away from this addiction with technology and get back to those activities I, so enjoyed before this invasion in our lives.  Yes, for sure.  Just as soon as I track our last order from Amazon.

Perhaps a few of Karen's photos that didn't make it in our 2024 calendar will relieve the stress reading the above induces.

Courting Barrow's goldeneye drakes doesn't seem to impress his "lady."

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Song Sparrow with feast of wild celery seeds.

Well-fed young raven begs for more.

Gulls "chilling" on iceberg

Pacific wren chick

Wild Celery:  Careful, it can burn when touched.

One glance from this critter and Karen turns to jelly.