Thursday, July 21, 2022

Swallows Following Me as I Mow

This field was drilled with forage peas, which offered the possibility of harvesting them around the 1st of August prior to drilling/planting Kernza soon after. Unfortunately the peas couldn't crowd out the weeds, mostly lambsquarters. The resulting mass of green material would be too much to put through the combine. If the weeds were dead/brown too, along with the dried peas, I think it would work.

Alternatively I could have tried swathing it all, hoping that everything would dry out in windrows, and then put it through the combine. A lot of things have to go right for that to work; ultimately I didn't think I could make that happen. So I'm mowing them down as a green manure.

The swallows are so graceful. They are a joy to watch. Too bad my camera didn't really pick them up.


 

"Geometric Analysis Reveals How Birds Mastered Flight"

Evolution has created a far more complicated flying device than we have ever been able to engineer,” said Samik Bhattacharya, an assistant professor in the experimental fluid mechanics lab at the University of Central Florida…. most birds can morph their wings mid-flight to flip back and forth between flying smoothly like a passenger plane and flying acrobatically like a fighter jet. Their work makes it clear that birds can completely alter both the aerodynamic characteristics that govern how air moves over their wings and the inertial characteristics of their bodies that determine how they tumble through the air to complete fast maneuvers.

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