Picto Diary - 01, 02 May 2020 - Racoon

Above: TIMDT and friends. Rail Trail. Wanship, UT 01 May 2020

Summit County Orange
Daily three miler.

Above: Critter truck and critter guys. Home. 01 May 2020

Summit County Orange

Not "bats in the belfry," but, racoon in the crawlspace. Critter makes lot of noise around 3:00 AM shuffling around in the rafters. Here, benign trap is being set... won't harm the animal, but, is expected to capture it. Apparently, it climbed up the tree seen in the image to get to the roof. My neighbor had a hypothesis. He said he has had three racoons around his house for a few weeks, but for the last week, he has only seen two of them. There has been a mountain lion lurking around his house, he said, and, he wonders if the third racoon got spooked and looked to find a safe place away from the danger.

Above: Nostalgia image. November, 2011. My BMW R1200 GS motorcycle on Ruta 7 in Chilean Patagonia between Coyhaique and Cocrane. Image lifted from Motoquest Tours 2012 Calendar was taken by Mwah (sic).

On our way to our daily three mile walk, we noticed that the left front tire on the Porche Cayenne had lost ten pounds of pressure. The tires were just purchased and installed two days ago. We drove over to Burt Brothers, on highway US 40. Tom, the store manager, despite beaucoup customers waiting, took the car in immediately, so we decided to do our walk in the general area between Burt Brothers and Silver Creek Village while the tire was being repaired. Thirty minutes out we found ourselves too exposed to an oncoming thunderstorm. We sought shelter under the overhang on a Rocky Mountain Power building. The rain started to pour. Burt Brothers was a half mile away. We decided to sit on the ground, backs against the locked door of the office building and wait out the storm. Tom called and said the car was ready. "Its really storming ot there," he said. "Where are you guys? Do you need a ride back here?" We took him up on his offer. Mask on his face and wearing rubber gloves, he drove our car to where we were, picked us up, and drove us back to his store. He said that there was a minor leak in the bead of the wheel caused by corrosion. They "sanded" off the corrosion and, with some compound, restored the corroded area, and the tire no longer leaks. Tom wiped the car and door handles down with disinfectant before he sent us on our way. Good customer relations in response to a minor, but inconvenient, tire problem.

Addendum:

Steve,

Looks like you have some keen birders in the group.
We could do some birding trips next time in India. We have over a 1000 species of endemic and migratory birds in the country.
Some of them come to India from as far as Siberia. Like the cranes, bar headed geese etc. These are winter visitors.
Just some information that I wanted to share.
Regards

Mohan,
Gurgaon, India

Three or four years ago we visited Bharatpur, near Agra, one of the most amazing bird sanctuaries I had ever seen. I asked our guide, tongue in cheek, if this were actually an aviary... where all the birds had been sourced elsewhere and brought here. All the other parks we have visited in India have been replete with birds of all sorts. I have a favored image of a Hornbill that I captured at Kaziranga circa 2015.