Meanwhile: Bird Strikes, Ovulating Snakes, Connection Issues and Spoiler Warnings

We have a bird strike problem. Spring is here, and birds are returning in huge numbers. And on a near-daily basis, they’re colliding with our windows. Usually it’s a glancing blow and they fly off, but sometimes it’s worse. Last Wednesday a dark-eyed junco hit hard enough that I thought it had died: it was prone on the ground for an awfully long time, but when I checked back later it had disappeared. Either it recovered and flew off, or it didn’t and was carried away by another animal. A female purple finch hit rather harder on Thursday, and her fate was rather less ambiguous (pictured above).

A thrush lost its encounter with a window last fall as well.

We’ll have to do something about this: we have a lot of birds around here, and I don’t like being responsible for reducing that number. The house is surrounded by trees, which the windows reflect very well, especially on sunny days, and especially in spring and fall when there aren’t leaves to provide some shade. A friend has suggested ultraviolet window decals as a deterrent, and we’ve received some other suggestions on how to reduce bird strikes. Until we get those set up, at the very least I’ll have to keep the curtains shut on sunny days.

Pretzel has refused to eat three times in a row. She’s our oldest corn snake, and almost certainly our oldest snake overall: I acquired her nearly 20 years ago, in May 1999, and she wasn’t a baby when I got her. When an old snake suddenly goes off her food, that’s usually a sign that the end is near. But not in this case, I think. She’s all soft and expansive in the belly, which tells me that the old girl is actually full of eggs. Pretz was always one to lay lots of eggs, to the point that she was gaunt and hollow afterward; I stopped trying to breed her nearly a decade and a half ago, because her eggs weren’t hatching any more and I didn’t want to put her through that for no reason. She usually laid her eggs in May, so we’ll see soon enough if that’s what this is. I expect she’ll be back on her food after that.

Our Internet connection troubles may finally have been solved. Cable crews were in the area on Thursday and pinpointed our house as an issue for the neighbourhood’s signal quality. We’d previously noticed periodic and persistent bandwidth losses, usually in the evening, that seemed to have no identifiable cause and were resistant to all fixes. The culprit in both cases was the last few feet of coaxial cable, which couldn’t be easily replaced because it was routed underneath the front porch. We found a way to reroute the line into the basement, where I moved all the networking gear. Because the troubles were intermittent, it’s too soon to say whether the fix is actually a fix: the dog has to fail to bark, if you follow my meaning.

One reason why the crews were in the area is that our cable company is in the process of offering significantly faster download speeds in our region. Right now we have 15 megabits, the fastest speed they had on offer. Not bad for a small town. Now they’re offering 30- and 50-megabit downloads in my area, and the crew told us that 100 megabits should be available by next month or so. I always want the fastest speed on offer, but with the troubles we’d been having I wasn’t sure there’d be much point in paying for bandwidth the line couldn’t handle. Now though? Bring on the megabits.

I may be changing my mind on spoiler warnings. Saw Avengers: Endgame on Friday night. I’d planned on seeing it unspoiled, but I made the mistake of visiting the movie’s Wikipedia entry a few days before release: the page had a complete (and accurate) plot synopsis. Wikipedia editors were unrepentant on the Talk page, pointing out that the movie had already been released in some markets. Which strikes me—as someone who’s generally been pro-spoiler—as a dick move.

I’ve deliberately spoiled myself going into movies and I’ve gone in unspoiled, and there are pros and cons to either method. I’ve always felt the spoiler police were being excessive. (Spoilers about sports results, or decades-old movies or books? Get a grip.) I do think that going in unspoiled requires a certain amount of Internet hygiene: avoid fan sites, discussion boards, anything related to the thing being spoiled. I just didn’t think that Wikipedia was one of the sites that needed to be avoided, especially four days before the movie launched in North America.