Category: Nature

General observations, generally during dog walks

Engineering the Solís Chico

A year ago—as for a long time—Parque del Plata faced over a kilometer of surf beach that was inaccessible to casual beachgoers. Then someone had an idea. Instead of shoveling away the dunes that completely blow over the Rambla (beach road) every year, and hauling them in dump trucks to make a beach further up the rio Solís Chico…

..make a new mouth for the river. And then…

…add another land bridge (now wider), and just like that, Parque del Plata has almost a kilometer of new ‘ocean’ beach.

Pretty darned clever. But stay tuned. The Solís Chico is always changing. As we get into winter, I suspect it’s not going to be happy with that right-angle turn for long. But perfect for summer!

BTW, I feel obliged to put ocean in quotation marks, because—despite there being no flow along the shore, and no opposing shore—the Urguayans insist this is a river, not the ocean.

Two months old!

More falcon. When I said my wife wanted to know su edad, she said 26. Well, su edad can mean his/her/its age or your age (formal). I would not address someone less than half my age formally—no, the bird’s age, I clarified. She laughed heartily.

Their estimate is two months.

So, language blunders aside, that’s wild. Big bird for two months old!

The falcon

A girl with a falcon has been at our local park lately. The bird was rescued when both parents were killed. It didn’t know how to fly. It’s a male, smaller than the females. I still don’t know what type it is. The names she gives me don’t correspond to anything I find in the bird book. She puts a cap over its head when she drives back to Montevideo. I asked if it always made noise – It doesn’t at night 😉