#2172 "Robinson Lake Morning Cloud"

The bald eagle flew by as I painted but this time he was headed upstream. More large fish charged the shallow waters causing the minnow to scatter. Sometimes it startled me. In the quiet I heard what might have been a merlin. The merlin is a small falcon about the same size as a blue jay. They are fast flyers.

Apparently merlins have a voracious appetite. It has been estimated that during the breeding season a family of merlins consumes 24 kilograms of prey. That is a lot of birds when one considers that the bulk of their diet is small songbirds that weigh only a few ounces each. When hunting, the merlin typically flies over open forest or grassland at high speed (up to 70 km/h), flushing out birds and snatching individuals which react too slowly. Merlins are extremely agile in the air, able to make remarkably rapid changes of direction to keep up with their quarry. Alternatively, merlins may hunt by watching for activity from a perch and then launching into rapid flight from there. The open water between islands and across rivers and lakes explains why merlins often nest near water. Merlins also feed on insects, especially in migration when they often grab dragonflies or butterflies out of the air. These are snacks which they eat in flight without even slowing down.

I cleared my throat like Buddy Holly did in his preparation for "True Love Ways". They caught this act on the master tapes. Something that sounded quite large retreated hastily along the waterfront and headed away from me downstream into the thick brush. I never saw what it was.

Patches of fog lingered in the Dumoine valley while tentacles of mist spiralled upward from the forest canopy. The low cloud was headed toward the southeast. The upper cloud was headed northeastward. There was a lot of wind shear in the atmosphere. We were still going to remain within the hot and humid air mass at least for another day.

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