Dead sea turtle

It has been a while since I’ve seen interesting dead things on the beach. Yesterday’s was a good-sized sea turtle.

A young boy came over and started explaining something, but I could not make head or tail of what he was saying. Rioplatense Spanish can be pretty brutal, even more so when spoken by kids.

A tortoise!

A first!

We have never before seen a tortoise on the dog walk. You think that, if there were tortoises around, the dogs would have encountered them. But they acted absolutely mystified by this thing that wasn’t moving, but they knew by smell was alive.

We gave them a few minutes to be curious, then left the tortoise in peace.

Carpinchos

We visited a place in the hills below Minas, Uruguay, whose owner had taken on two brother capybaras (called carpinchos locally) from the local zoo. Apparently when they get to be too many in too small a place, they fight, and it’s ugly. The one who runs away in the first clip decided to go swimming rather than deal with the handful of humans watching at feeding time.

Huge, and dead.

By far the biggest DTOTB (Dead Thing On The Beach) we’ve ever seen. Interesting that a week or so ago I paused for some while watching a flock of birds diving for fish 100 meters offshore. From time to time I saw what looked like a fin. From this sea lion? It was about the same location.

I haven’t been back to the beach since (that’s now our alternative, not main, dog walk) to know current status. As it was, I made a point of walking upwind of it. I’m not that curious.

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 😉

Baby bird

A couple days ago, as we sat outside in the evening, we noticed a small bird flitting down to the ground repeatedly under the big pine tree in our backyard. Looking more closely, I saw a tiny bit of a baby bird trying to move through the grass. Fallen out of the nest?

I got a small table and a cardboard box to put it in, so it could be safe from dogs. I carefully avoided touching it. We didn’t see if the parent bird found it.

I went out the next morning, saw a blue-gray lump under one of the leaves, and fully expected it to be dead. I gently touched it with a leaf, and it jumped up and flitted to the other side of the box, making as much noise as it possibly could.

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In the afternoon it was gone. We looked all around in the yard with no luck. No sign of anything. In the evening, again sitting in the backyard, we noticed the dog jump back from under the lemon tree as something abruptly moved. Guess who?

So back in the box. Parent bird located it. I watched the parent bird fly out of the box into the lemon tree, followed by a little grayish blur. The light was fading, but the little one had definitely left the box. Again.

No sign of it this morning. Until…

…after working a bit on the barbacoa ceiling, Daniel came into my office, hands cupped together holding – you guessed it. The baby bird had somehow gotten onto the barbacoa roof and then fell off.

So again into the box on the little table near the lemon tree. Little guy was having none of that. Out!

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“Don’t even think about it again, human!”

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So there he is, hanging out in the lemon tree, a tiny fluff ball, able to fly level a few meters and to get to a higher spot in the tree. Quite the feisty thing. Now I don’t know if he fell out of the nest to begin with, or not. Might have just decided to go for it?

I haven’t gotten a close enough look at the padre to ID the type.

Photos: Daniel Silva