Head in the sand

Burrowing Owl, originally uploaded by http://andrewskelton.net.

If ever I were to keep a raptor as a pet it would have to be a Burrowing Owl. They certainly have that special something when it comes to cuteness but don’t be fooled – they have bags of attitude as well. The light coloured feathers above their eyes resemble pale eye brows giving them a look of permanent consternation, especially with those bright orange eyes(yes I know they look yellow – it’s a trick of the light/camera); when they look at you, you almost feel like apologising. As described before, the colouration of an owls’ eyes helps identify when these birds are active, orange eyed owls are crepuscular, in other words, they hunt at Dawn and Dusk (sounds like a Goth Pub to me!).

There are in fact 22 varieties of Burrowing Owl found throughout North and South American; from memory I think this one is the Southern variety (as it hooted with elongated vowels and ate dinner instead of tea as an evening meal!) though that’s only because I read the sign, not that I can tell the difference between these little ground dwellers. Of course with a lot of dedication (and more importantly the right reference books) I would be able to tell the difference, but like Warblers – is the effort worth the end result (does that mean I’ll be thrown out of the Birdwatching fraternity for my ambivalence?).

I’m currently waiting for an over the airwaves upgrade for my Android Tablet; Asus have said that towards the end of February, and possibly in to March, they will be pushing Ice-Cream Sandwich – the latest version of the operating system. Quite why I’m keen for the new operating system to arrive, I don’t know; looking at the new features list, there’s nothing on there that I really need, there is the hope that it will all work smoother and faster with the same hardware. Mind you, it doesn’t take much to please me, I noticed that the Google Docs app installed on the tablet had an update which I duly updated. As with the WordPress upgrade I was pleasantly surprised when I then opened to the application to find it much more feature rich – it even has some capability to work on documents offline which is a big step up. Currently I use an application called Catch which does pretty much the same thing, from which when I’ve completed a blog, I transfer to Google Docs when I get online. From there I then finally take the text over to WordPress to publish it, make corrections etc. Taking on of these parts of the process out of the loop would certainly be a bonus, let’s hope the app delivers.

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