Feeling Owlish

My balcony. Terrifying to pigeons. Hahahaha.

It's almost spring. Love is in the air.

Sunday I removed the stalagmites of pigeon poop from three years ago. If you visit here often, you know I love birds, but I do not love pigeons pooping all over my balcony. This spring, I'm  waging war, not love--or so I tell myself. There was a dove sitting on the couch out there this morning and I'm clearly insane because I added a third owl. Two plastic owls weren't doing the trick, so now there are three plastic owls. Snakes, my aunt told me on the phone earlier, get some rubber snakes. Rubber snakes, plastic owls. Pretty soon I won't want to go out there.

There''s also an owl in the palm tree below my balcony.

I have an owl suspended above my front door too. It startles me sometimes when I catch a glimpse of it from my upstairs hallway.

The swallows will begin to arrive any day now. The best solution for that is to take off the window screen and spend a lot of time upstairs by the window where they like to nest. I stalk them with a spray bottle. Eventually they give up, but it's a full time job for a couple of days.

Uh-oh. I gotta go. I hear pigeons cooing.

Of Birds and Girls and Mother Nature

The abandoned swallows nests were pulled down today. Bug spray was applied to neutralize any bird mites. Measurements were take for a "bird slide" in order to discourage a new colony from nesting next spring. As much as I love birds, the constant rain of bird droppings was a bit much. Not to mention the unmelodic chirp of swallows outside my bedroom window. Meanwhile, "Marina" the pigeon (so named by the granddaughter) sits on her nest on my balcony. We're waiting for baby birds. This is not a great photo, but if you look in the shadows, you'll see the nest.

Our outing today included a thorough exploration of the shops in Ventura Harbor Village, and a stop at the Channel Islands National Park visitor center. We watched a 20-minute movie about the place and looked at the exhibits. I feel a bit faint when I realize how close I live to all that beauty.
And of course, there was the beach.

The granddaughter had a rather bizarre bathing suit malfunction. After returning home, she discovered that a good 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup of sand filtered its way through the lining of her suit and is now lodged between the swimming suit lining and the suit itself. I raised two beach loving daughters, and don't recall running across a suit like this one. Yes, some girls' and women's suits do have the weird little not fully sewn down crotch lining that can fill up with sand like a pocket, but in this suit the lining is a full lining and it's completely attached from the top to the bottom of the suit. It's just not impermeable. The only way to release the sand will be to snip the lining out. Clothes. So many of them are more trouble than they're worth.

The conversation today mostly revolved around sea creatures. My favorite part of the day was the silent time I spent watching the girl play. She's 10. She has a brother and a sister, but she lost herself in herself--in her imagination and the "work" of her play. It's a lovely thing how serious children are about playing. How totally they concentrate on it and don't need direction.