Nature Done Wright

     According to my calculations, Mrs. Ace the screech owl should be 26 days into an incubation that takes from 26 to 31 days, so I’ll be doing a daily morning update from here on in.

  The bottom line is: No news is good news.

   She is still sitting on four eggs.

  She still takes a break after dusk to "go to the bathroom" and cough up pellets.

   And Mr. Ace seems to be feeding her regularly, although — from her frequent calling — probably not as much as she would like.

    As I have watched the monitor, a few evenings a week I have seen Mr. Ace stick his head in and hand the Mrs. a moth or other morsel, but I have not been able to photograph the exchange yet.

   I am sure there is a way that I could hook up the feeds from the camera to the VCR and tape long stretches at a time.

   But I have fund that fiddling with the connections on the back of the TV has its limits.

   I have been doing some audio recordings of Mrs. Ace for a research project, and last night after I had played with the TV monitor output connections,

   I later activated the monitor and found that I had lost both sound and audio on the screech-cam — not a happy feeling.

   My worst fear is that last evening’s steady rain had somehow shorted out the cam.

    Fortunately, I thought to tweak the screech-cam connections on the back of the TV, and I was able to get the sound and picture back.

    A friend likes to quote the old saying, "Don’t mess with success."

    So I am not going to mess around anymore with any of the wiring. 🙂