Many thanks to everyone who helped me identify my mystery bird as a chickadee. Woohoo! The call is still monotonous, but at least it’s identifiably monotonous.

Preparations to move proceed apace.

In other news, a teenager in Fort Worth shot his face off with a potato gun. He was shooting frogs out of the potato gun (much to the detriment of the frogs’ health) the gun jammed, presumably on frog parts, and he looked down the barrel, whereupon he took a high-powered amphibian to the face. My sympathy is definitely lacking. If you’re cruel enough to shoot a frog out of a gun for amusement, and dumb enough to look down the barrel of a loaded weapon, then I’m sorry–natural selection has selected against you. And that’s fine. I’d rather you weren’t in my species. As a teenager, I did stupid stuff, and I even was involved in the firing of a potato gun at one point, (and the subsequent noise complaint, police arrival, and mad fleeing into the bush) but ya know what? Nobody EVER looked down the barrel, and I’d’ve attacked anyone trying to put a live animal in it, not that anyone would have proposed such, being relatively decent people, other than having a fondness for loud noises. I feel badly for his parents–it sucks to have that happen to your kid–but if you didn’t teach him respect for life and respect for the end of a gun, then you fell down on the job. (Of course, given the way our society is structured, they’ll probably sue the DNR for not labelling the frogs as being inappropriate ammunition.) I wonder occasionally if there is a gene for Not Doing Really Stupid Shit. Like sticking your head in geysers. At some point, animals prone to sticking their heads in geysers would have done so, and in a rapid and efficient manner, been selected against. You hardly ever see elk strolling up to Old Faithful now and shoving their noggins into it. Someday, science will locate the Not Sticking Your Head In A Geyser gene common to most vertebrates, and then…um…I dunno what. We’ll invent a biological weapon that turns that gene off, thereby causing any affected populace to off themselves through idiotic acts. On second thought, maybe someone already did that, and some of those new reality TV shows are a result. Anyway, I lost what I was saying, except that people shouldn’t mess with frogs, damnit.