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I still have a mint condition Woody Woodpecker 70’s lunchbox because I hated it and refused to take it to school. Could not stand that cartoon.

What’s up with Brexit?

So…how do you feel about Chilly Willy? Cool or Not cool?

Ric:

I’m pretty sure that even Brits don’t have any idea of what is happening with Brexit. From what I have heard, which is probably not complete, both Houses of Parliament have passed a bill requiring Boris to beg the EU for an extension past October 31, I understand the Queen has agreed to it. And that there are rumors/reports/wishful thinking about all sorts of scenarios that may or may not exist in this universe. We will know October 31, and maybe even not then.

You have to have a critical mass of people in a country that want to be free, in order to keep freedom. Both we and the Brits are testing the size of that critical mass. Interesting times on both sides of the Atlantic. It is a good thing to have access to weapons. 😉

Subotai Bahadur

JK Rowling wants you to know that Rocky was actually a transgender squirrel. She just never thought that needed mentioning in the stories she wrote.

But she decided, NOW you need to know.

And the forecast for Brexit is discussions until another vote can be held which will do away with the whole silly Brexit idea, and Europe (and England) can get on being ruled by unelected people living in Brussels while taking their orders from the old aristocracy, and Germany.

the good news though, is Bearcow isn’t going to get a peer. Maybe he doesn’t have a boat anyway!

The song sounds like a yaffle…the call not so much. We have pileated woodpeckers…they really look like dinosaurs.

They’ve been drilling our young willow trees. I hung blank CD’s on fishing line among the branches. The CDs spin and reflect images and bright shafts of light…scares the bejeezus out of birds. Works great for fruit trees too.

@ BJM, sorry to hear of your willow damage. The CD mobile worked well at our mountain cabin too, but we didn’t hear about their usefulness until we’d nailed up a handful of rounds cut from sheet metal to cover up the woodpeckers’ work on the cabin siding. Now we use a black silhouette of a large hawk hung from a rafter at the front edge of the porch. It seems to be just as effective because it’s nearly always in motion. It looks slightly tidier than the swag of CDs looped across the front of the house, and we’ve accepted the “rustic” look of the sheet metal hole-covers. We wage constant war against critters. Last evening we discovered a packrat in our garage after returning from a 2-day “vacation”. Our furry hitchhiker rode somewhere inside the undercarriage of the truck for 140 miles, 20 of them on rutted gravel road, poor thing. We trapped it using a bit of banana, some raisins and chopped walnut pieces, then drove it at midnight down to the greenbelt along the river, where it will probably lead a very lonely life. Packrats are exceptionally cute little foot-stampers, destructive as all get-out, but easier to deal with than roving cattle and most of the other wildlife people contend with in this area.

Are you telling me when I move to the country I’m going to have to deal with critters?

Drunk raccoons?

Even as a small child in the 60s, back in the days when cartoons were exceptionally violent, I always thought Woody was a sadist. Not funny, just cruel.

@catnip I troweled Tanglefoot on the trunks and branches. They hated sticky feets. The trees healed themselves once the birds let them be.

Tanglefoot works great to keep ants off fruit trees too, or you could go old school with a white lime wash.

@Durned…not only drunken raccoons but Robins too. Pyracantha bushes are loaded with overly ripe, fermenting berries in the autumn and winter and migrating birds gorge on them, especially Robins who seem to enjoy the buzz.

@BJM, thanks for the mention of Tanglefoot products. I’d forgotten them. Squirrels have almost completely torn the bark from a 4-ft. section of one main branch on our dogwood tree at home. Maybe the pruning and grafting compound would protect the bare spot. (It doesn’t quite girdle the branch.)

I’m late to the party, but …
Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged defines the intransitive verb “yaffle” as synonymous with “yaff.” The entry for “yaff” is as follows:
“yaff intransitive verb \ˈyaf\
inflected form(s): -ed/-ing/-s
Scottish
: bark, yelp, yap
Origin of YAFF
imitative”

Sadly, the Oxford online English dictionary (which is NOT the OED) gives yaffle only as noun, and defines it as “another term for green woodpecker”–but there does seem to have been at least some non-recursive source for the name.

Professor Yaffle was a character in Bagpuss, a UK children’s TV series in the seventies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagpuss

Weirdly, he was a woodpecker made of wood…