Day of All Hawks, 46th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Helios): My alternating-day walk got rained out today, but I made good use of my free time by voting in the run-off election for the Georgia primary, and then got my annual emission inspection done (all good). 

Remember in 2020 when, after Georgia elected Joe Biden for president, a group of Republicans fraudulently tried to pass themselves off as the official electors and cast the state's votes for the Stable Genius in the electoral college? One of those fake electors, Burt Jones, is now in the Republican primary runoff for governor, and unsurprisingly has the Stable Genius' endorsement. He's described as a S.G. loyalist and holds fervent anti-immigration views. 

His opponent, Rick Jackson, has never held public office and has no history of public service, but he's supposedly a billionaire and thinks he can run the state like a business. He gives off these creepy Kenneth Copeland vibes, and is bombarding the Atlanta airwaves with a constant barrage of television commercials, each one more distressing than the one before. He compares himself to a home-grown version of the Stable Genius - "an outsider" who has enough wealth that he "doesn't owe nobody nothing." 

A dishonest, borderline criminal Lieutenant Governor (Jones) versus a creepy billionaire health-care executive. The only person who can save us from being governed by one or the other is the Democratic candidate, Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former mayor of Atlanta. 

Let me tell you one thing about Georgia politics - candidates, especially Republican candidates, win their races by campaigning against Atlanta. To the rural voters outside the city, Atlanta is too crowded, too dirty, gets too much of the tax revenue, and is too black and too gay. All that either Jones or Jackson will have to do to beat Bottoms in the general election is remind voters that she used to be the mayor of Atlanta. Case closed. Game over.

It's only made worse that she was mayor during the covid crisis and the George Floyd protests and associated unrest. After Rayshard Brooks was killed by the police in South Atlanta and protesters burned down the Wendy's at which he was killed and blockaded the streets, she wisely didn't throw gasoline on the fire by sending in the SWAT team to take back the streets, but that allowed her opponents to label her as "soft on crime." Others remember her for the unpopular mask mandates and school closings over which she was forced to administer. 

So all that Jackson/Jones has to do to beat her is remind voters of those difficult times ("I'll never make you wear no mask") and act tough on crime, especially against immigrants and minorities. One of Jackson's ads already declares that if anyone tries that kind of stuff when he's Governor, "you'll either be departed or deported." Not that Jones' ads are much better - in one he uses an AI-generated video of Jackson shoveling money into a furnace.

But Bottoms is not even that popular with progressives here in Atlanta. Politically, she lost the battle for mask mandates and against early school and business openings when she was outmaneuvered by Brain Kemp, and after the presidential election of 2020, it seemed like she lost all interest in actually being Mayor and was just waiting for a political appointment by Joe Biden. He ultimately made her a Senior Advisor as the Director of the Office of Public Engagement. No doubt, Jackson Jones will label her as a "Biden insider."

On top of all that, she's a black woman in a state where a distressing number of voters still feel that either disqualifies a person from holding office. The name "Stacy Abrams" is still used here as a racist dog-whistle shorthand way of saying "not one of us."

I have no political disagreement with Bottoms. I think she's highly intelligent and well qualified to be Governor. I will vote for her. I just think that it these reactionary times, she doesn't stand a chance of winning a race against one of two white Republican men, unless the candidate who wins today flames out and screws up royally, something which I wouldn't put past Jones or Jackson.                  

 

Day of Suffering Night, 5th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Electra): NOAA's Climate Prediction Center has confirmed that El Niño conditions have officially developed in the equatorial Pacific (oh shit, there goes the old man talking about the weather again). As has been widely speculated, this El Niño has the potential to become one of the strongest on record. The good news is we can expect a quieter Atlantic hurricane season but it likely also means a much wetter winter for the southern U.S. and a near-certain spike in global temperatures. 

Tomorrow, Georgia will hold a runoff election for last month's primaries. Most of the important Democratic candidates have already won their primary and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, is the Democratic nominee for governor (although I didn't vote for her). Tomorrow's runoff will decide between Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Rick Jackson, a creepy billionaire health-care executive. Both are awful, but Jones has the backing of the Stable Genius and outgoing Governor Cheatin' Brian Kemp, while Jackson has no government experience, no record of public service, and has never ran for office before. However, he has run a seemingly endless stream of television commercials, each one more vile than the others, to the point where I've even heard Republicans complain, "enough already."     

I'm invested in the outcome of the Republican primary because I think there's no way Keisha Lance Bottoms (a black woman, a Democrat, and from Atlanta on top of all that) wins the statewide election, and whichever Republican wins tomorrow's primary will probably be my next governor. Please, please don't let it be Jackson!   

The Republicans are also in a runoff here to face Senator Jon Ossoff. With KLB also on the ballot for November, Democrats here are testing the slogan "Vote Your Bottoms and Ossoff." It's going to be a long year. 

Sen. Ossoff has proved to be a prodigious fund-raiser with a knack for going viral, and even Republicans acknowledge that he's a formidable candidate. He may even be a potential 2028 presidential candidate. Tomorrow, two Republicans will vie to run against him - Representative Mike Collins, a MAGA loyalist and immigration hard-liner, and Derek Dooley, a former football coach and son of legendary Georgia coach Vince Dooley. 

The Stable Genius has endorsed Collins, but Dooley is family friends with Kemp and has his support. Kemp famously has clashed with Trump before, refusing to join his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

Senator Raphael Warnock, Georgia's other Democratic Senator, was on the Sunday morning talk-show circuit promoting his new book, The Crooked Places Made Straight, and possibly testing his presidential campaign potential.

 

The Offside Mysteries, 44th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Deneb): London's The Guardian reports that a petition is underway in central Georgia's Coweta County against something called  Project Sail, a planned 800-acre-plus datacenter near the town of Newnan. The petition seeks a referendum that would also prohibit other datacenters and cryptocurrency mining operations from moving forward. Coweta County has about 160,000 residents, two-thirds of whom voted for the Stable Genius.

The petition organizers say they have collected about 6,500 signatures against their goal of 14,000.  If the campaign is successful, Coweta County could become only the third county in Georgia history to stage a referendum, which allows residents to challenge a county policy or decision.

Recent polling suggests seven in ten people in the US would oppose a datacenter being built near their homes. Monterey Park, California, recently became the first US city to pass a referendum against datacenters earlier this month. 

The Coweta County referendum follows an anti-gentrification effort on Georgia’s Sapelo Island, home to a community of Gullah Geechee people descended from enslaved West Africans who had ben forced to work on coastal plantations. Due to the geographic isolation of the island, the people retained strong African cultural traditions, creating a completely distinct language and cuisine. The referendum successfully defeated a proposal to allow larger houses on the island that would have affected the Gullah Geechee way of life. 

Before that, a referendum on Atlanta's Cop City police recreational facility met the required number of signatures, but the petition was ignored by the city and the effort was tied up in court even as construction proceeded (it's since been completed). Georgia attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Chris Carr made his support for Cop City and his persecution of its protesters a campaign issue, and came in a distant fourth in the May 19 Republican primary. Good. Fuck that guy.   

The ability to stage a referendum in Georgia comes from provisions in the state’s constitution. A certain percentage of a county’s registered voters must sign a petition against a policy passed by elected representatives. Once the threshold of confirmed signatures is reached and a referendum is authorized, the county residents can vote on the issue and potentially reverse their elected officials' decision. Referendums (referenda?) are a tool that shows people don’t have to acquiesce to elected leaders, particularly when they don’t have people’s interests at heart.  

Remember, Georgia was recently ranked No. 1 in the country for its freedom of press.

 

Day of the Five Lost Havens, 43rd of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Castor): Greetings from the most boring person on the internet. All I ever talk about here anymore is the weather, my walks, the weather during my walks, or some random, old-man memory.  

Castor is a sitting day, so today we'll instead talk about lamps. I bought a new lamp yesterday (woo-hoo!) because for some reason, not one, not two, but three lamps in my house all stopped working within the course of about the past two months. First, the rotary switch on the floor lamp I used to have in the study stopped working. At first, I had to try about five or six times before it finally clicked on, and then a dozen or so tries, and then finally it just wouldn't switch on at all anymore. Of course, I checked the bulb, the circuit breaker, the outlet, etc., but it seems like the lamp just gave up the ghost. 

I replaced the floor lamp with a table lamp from another room and placed it on a tall end table, but it wasn't long before that lamp also stopped reliably switching on and off, too. I replaced it with a third lamp that I fortunately just had sitting around for some reason (over time, one accumulates a lot of lamps) and so far so good, but wouldn't you know it, a third lamp, the one in the den, stopped working. To get it to light, I had to slowly turn the key about half of the way and stop before it clicked to the next position. Fine, but then it was about a quarter of the way, and then an eighth, and the "on" portion of the rotation just kept getting smaller and smaller until I couldn't find it anymore. 

I was just about out of spare lamps, so I finally sprang and bought a new one yesterday. It's a nifty modern little feller, with two USB ports built into its base for charging all the electronic devices that Georgia Power tells me use up 20% of my kilowatt hours. I made sure it had a pull-chain switch, because apparently rotary switches are having a tough time in this house. In all my many years, I can recall dozens, scores probably, of light bulbs dying, but I don't recall a lamp switch ever stop working before. And now three this year. 

Meanwhile, here's a fun fact: with the SpaceX IPO, Elon Musk's net worth is now further from Jeff Bezos' than Bezos' net worth is from that of the average American household. It's not that I believe trillionaires shouldn't exist, but I think that much wealth in one single hand is a symptom of the problem with our 21st Century economy (i.e., late-stage capitalism).

The Stable Genius' name is finally off of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts!

 

Odd Man Out, 42nd Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): You can't get down off an elephant but you can get down off a duck. - Zen Master Groucho

If there were any doubt that despite the AI images used in each blog post, the written content is 100% human generated, no bot would open a post with a joke that old or corny. Or remind you appropos of nothing that there are 68 quadrillion miles of fungi filaments in the Earth’s underground circulatory system, which carries water and nutrients to plants while pulling carbon away from them. That length is roughly 730 million times greater than the distance between the Earth and the sun.

I walked a very, very small percentage of that distance today in hot, summery 91° weather. It was so warm that I cut a mile and a half of my usual route, so it was only a 6.5-mile Quincy, but once again, my phone only recorded a 5.6-mile Monroe, robbing me of nearly a mile.  

Last night, I shot an elephant in Tuscaloosa. What Alabama was doing in my pajamas I have no idea.

James Carville says that if Democrats regain power, they should immediately move to make Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. states and expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices. I would add they should also abolish the Electoral College. 

And fuck Elon Musk!

 

The Stagger Litany, 41st Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): I have ominous premonitions about the near future. It feels like we're heading for some catastrophe or another. 

Martial law and suspension of the midterm elections? I wouldn't rule that out. A financial crisis with runaway inflation, spiraling oil prices, and devaluation of the U.S. dollar? Doesn't sound unreasonable.  Global outbreak of ebola or screwworm or flesh-eating bacteria? The safeguards against those epidemics are largely gone. Agricultural collapse due to some combination of drought and fertilizer shortages caused by the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz? Followed by global starvation, mass displacement, antimigrant hysteria, and genocides? Kind of already happening. 

Sorry to be Debby Downer here. It's been raining a lot lately, and I'm probably not getting the amount of natural light necessary for a sunnier psychological disposition. But in my 72 years of living, I never felt so keenly that the wheels are about to come of the cart, and I lived through the 60s and Nixon, man.

I can feel it in my bones: we might even be in for some tectonic-level geological shit, like an eruption of the Yellowstone super-caldera or rupture of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. One might even trigger the other for a certain mass extinction event.

It's insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but my central bath needs to be redone - the peeling paint over the tile needs to be completely removed and the walls repainted. I may be overreacting, but I'm so uncertain about the near future that I'm hesitant to spend money on cosmetic upgrades to the house, when for all I know, civil war, riots, or worse will displace me anyway. 

They're asking ridiculous amounts for hotels in Knoxville for the dates of next year's Big Ears festival. I'm not at all convinced there will be a Big Ears 2027 for a variety of reasons, or that I'd be able to afford to attend even at previous year's hotel rates, so I'm not committing any money toward it.

Why pay for home improvement? Why plan for concerts? Gonna be different this time. Can't write a letter, can't send no postcard, I ain't got time for that now.

 

Day of Kings, 40th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Helios): I admit I live by two calendars. While I enjoy my fantasy New Revised Universal Solar Calendar, I recognize that I'm the only person on Earth who follows it so I'm obligate to also recognize the pedestrian old Gregorian calendar. 

Anyway, I was tempted to push Day of Kings from the 40th of Midsommar to the 44th, to coincide with June 14 and the next planned No Kings protests. But what is a calendar but a set of rules?, and rules are rules. I'm stuck in this prison of my own device and am forced to celebrate "No Kings" four days early, but I'll find a march on June 14 to celebrate it with the rest of amerika. 

I slept late today (hey, I'm retired - that's my prerogative!), but I still got my eight-mile walk in today. Of course, my phone only recorded a 7.8-mile Jackson and not a full Van Buren, but I'm used to that by now. The weather was warm and sticky - the cool, dry days of last May are now behind us and summer, although late in getting here, has finally arrived in Atlanta. 

We're only a little over a week into this year's hurricane season, but Tropical Depression Cristina has already formed in the Pacific. Rainfall associated with the storm may produce life-threatening flooding and mudslides in El Salvador, especially in areas of steep terrain. Storm conditions are possible along portions of the coast this afternoon and tonight.

A surface trough across the Yucatan Peninsula is causing scattered moderate and isolated strong convection, and a second trough is over the northeast Gulf of Mexico. A weak low-pressure center may emerge from the Yucatan into the Bay of Campeche tomorrow and then track slowly northwestward through the weekend. 

While I walked today, I listened to Jon Stewart's The Weekly Show podcast interview with Quinn Slobodian, coauthor of the new book Muskism about you-know-who (spoiler alert: the book asserts Musk doesn't have our best interests in mind). I also listened to a Nobody's Ever Asked Me That podcast interview of writer-director-actor Charles Lane, the auteur behind the indie film Sidewalk Stories (1989). I haven't seen the film, but after the podcast I noted that it's now streaming on HBO Max or Max or whatever they're calling it now, and marked it for later viewing, possibly even tonight.  

After the podcasts, I still had enough time/distance left on my walk to stream some recent jazz releases on Spotify, and for some reason suddenly got inspired to stream Captain Beefheart's Mirror Man (1971), which got me home.

According to the New York Times, the combined wealth of the world's nearly 3,000 billionaires is $20.1 trillion, an amount equivalent to nearly a fifth of the total value of all goods and services produced in a year by every country on earth. Fifteen years ago, billionaires collectively had $4.5 trillion. The world could get its first trillionaire this week when Citizen Musk's SpaceX launches its IPO. 

I still bow to no king, though.

 

Day of the Two Daughters, 39th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Electra): I got an email today from my electrical utility, the Georgia Power Company, part of the Southern Companies conglomerate. They congratulated me on allegedly being among the most energy-efficient homes in my area. According to their records, I used 321 kWh of electricity, which apparently is less than the standard for an "efficient home" of the same size.  

I'm not so sure I deserve any plaudits. This drafty old pile of bricks is hardly anybody's idea of energy-efficient construction, and I think whatever efficiencies I'm realizing is because I live here alone. I leave lights on in rooms I'm not occupying, but on the other hand, I only have to do laundry for one, my heat, hot water, and stove are all natural gas, and I disconnected my dishwasher a long time ago (washing dishes by hand is a Zen thing). 

But that's not the part I want to talk about. The email went on and broke down my energy usage by category, starting with the kitchen (28%). It makes sense that my kitchen uses the most power - the room is lit my some half dozen recessed lights which stay on virtually from the time I get up until the time I go to bed. But how does Georgia Power know how much of my total usage is for the kitchen? Are they tracking things by individual circuit breakers? 

They tell me 20% of my usage is for cooling and 12% for laundry, which again, are all on individual circuit breakers. But then it gets creepier - they claim another 20% of my usage is for "electronics." They may be so - I spend a lot of time on my computer, from posting these updates on my blog, to playing video games, to streaming music - but there's no dedicated circuit breaker for my computer and as far as they know it could be in any room of the house. The television is in one room, the computer in another, my stereo system in a third. How can they tell what percentage of my 321 kWh is used by my devices? 

I feel like Big Brother is providing my power, and letting me know they're watching what I'm doing. 

It was a month ago yesterday that I buried Eliot. I'm still adjusting. Living alone in retirement, my routines have become very important to me (preferences become habits, habits become routines, routines become rituals, and rituals begin to take on the feeling of the sacred). Much of my day revolved around Eliot's 7:00 pm feeding time. He would insist on being fed by 7:00 and let me know if I was late. He would have preferred earlier, but got quite loud and insistent by seven. Since I was up feeding him, I would use that time to also scoop out his litter box and take it out to the trash. If it were a Monday, I'd empty the box entirely, clean it, and apply fresh litter, and then roll the trash bins down the driveway for curbside pickup the next morning. And as long as I was heading outside to deal with the trash, I'd also take out whatever recyclables had accumulated in my sink. And while outside, I would also check the mailbox if I hadn't already done so earlier, and if it was Tuesday, I'd roll the bins back up the driveway (if I hadn't done that already). 

This little routine centered around Eliot's feeding time would take anywhere from 5 minutes some days to a half hour or more if it were Monday litter-box cleaning time. So whatever I was doing online, burning 20% of my kilowatt hours posting here or playing a video game, would have to take a long pause and before I started up again, I might as well make my own dinner. And then wash the dishes by hand (it's a Zen thing). Only then, would I settle down with Netflix, or a game, or posting, or whatever.

Now, without a feline mouth to feed, the fixed center of my daily routine/sacred ritual has been pulled out from under me. I can take out the trash and the recyclables . . . whenever I feel like it? That's anarchy! Eat when I'm hungry, not my cat? That's self-indulgent! And pick and choose when to take the trash bins up and down the driveway? That's not very Zen! ("The Great Way is not difficult - just avoid picking and choosing").   

Eliot's grave site is in my backyard garden and I can see it from my kitchen window. The dirt still hasn't settled and nothing yet grows over where he lies. I look out at his grave while making my afternoon smoothies, while washing my dishes, while sipping morning coffee. Impermanence is swift and life-and-death is the great matter, and it's not that Eliot is dead that's so disorienting to me. I always knew the day would come. I just wasn't prepared for how much it would throw me off my schedule.           

 

The Transcendental Outpost, 38th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Speaking of, I rewatched the movie, Midsommar, last night. Weird stuff. . . 

Deneb is a walking day, but it rained all afternoon. Flash flood warnings, the works. I didn't get so much as a Washington in today - my phone credits me with only 0.7 miles (1,876 steps). I compensated by doing a load of laundry and finally took some old, beat-up patio furniture out to the curb for garbage pickup tomorrow. 

Blows against the Empire: A federal judge today struck down the Stable Genius' scheme to charge $100,000 for H-1B visas, which allow employers to hire skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations for up to six years. Roughly two-thirds of H-1B positions are computer-related.

In other news, the bipartisan State of the Nation Project (https://stateofnation.org) ranked Georgia the No. 1 state for freedom of the press. No. 1. We also had the 7th lowest rate of youth depression, the eighth highest economic output, the 10th lowest rate of depression, and the 12th lowest number of fatal overdoses. We were 11th highest in trust in the Federal Government, which blows my mind because we're got no shortage of MAGA and QAnon conspiracy theorists here.

On the other hand, we're 49th in air quality (still better than Texas, though), 47th in incidents of low birth weight, 46th in hourly earnings growth, 43rd in poverty, and 40th in social isolation. So, if you've already been born, aren't relying on an hourly wage, don't mind being alone or a little ozone in the atmosphere, and want to live someplace with happy children, trust in the government, no depression or OD's, and an enviable free press, have we got the state for you.

 

Forming the Inner Ring, 37th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Castor): I miss newspapers. I miss walking through brick-and-mortar retail stores perusing the items on display. I miss used bookstores. I miss owning physical copies of CDs or even vinyl LPs and listening through the entire thing, multiple times. I miss the commitment one used to make to an album when purchasing it. 

That's it. That's all I have to say today. I said what I said, and anything more would be 

   

 

Stages of the True Field, 36th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I woke up to two hours of death- and thrash-metal this morning. I was not pleased.

I use an old clock radio as my alarm, and every morning it goes off at 7:00 am to Atlanta non-commercial. free-form radio station WREK. That doesn't mean I get up at 7:00 - most mornings, I just roll over and let the music mingle with near-lucid dreams until I finally decide to get out of bed. 

The weekday programming of WREK is classical from 7:00 to 8:00, and jazz from 8:00 to 9:00, but don't get me wrong. It's not Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven for an hour followed by an hour of Miles, Mingus, and Monk. Their "classical" is mostly avant-garde modern composers - I've heard Ornette Coleman, Harry Partch, and a lot of dissonant piano pounding in the first hour. Their jazz programming includes free jazz  and a lot of squanky saxophone solos. But that's all fine with me, I like a little spice on my morning meatball. 

But Saturday morning programming is more random, generally replays of past shows in various genres. This morning it was extreme metal, which is pretty difficult, at least for me, to incorporate into lucid dreaming. But I did get a crash course in the difference between death, thrash, and speed metal as I lay there stiff as a board in my bed, and was able to pick out Metallica and recognize the drumming of Dave Lombardo of Slayer. But lesson learned, I'm good now, and hope it's some other genre next Saturday.

Today is the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy Beach and the start of the major WWII counteroffensive. I marked the occasion with a 7-4 mile Jackson. It was actually eight miles, but I've already explained the problems with my phone's mileage app. The Stable Genius marked the occasion not by honoring the troops but by posting an AI image of the new Obama Presidential Library with a large pile of garbage on top and surrounded by homeless encampments. There's a joke going around: what's the difference between Iran and Vietnam? The Stable Genius had a plan for getting out of Vietnam.

D-Day occurred 10 years before I was born, but it feels to me like a historical event from distant history. The first election of the Stable Genius was ten years ago, but feels like, if not current events, at least recent history. I have yet to process the fact that when I was born, D-Day to my parents was as recent and as relevant to them as the 2016 election is to me today. Strange.         

 

Day of the Chicago Rose, 35th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): An auction of oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended today with just nine bids covering only about 10 percent of the available land. The Stable Genius predicted that drilling in the pristine wilderness area would set off an economic boom but most of the 58 tracts up for sale drew no bids at all. Nearly half of the sales came from the state of Alaska’s publicly owned economic development corporation and no major international oil companies entered bids.

The Stable Genius campaigned on turning oil development loose in the Arctic refuge ("drill, baby, drill"), promising that extracting petroleum there would lower the price of gasoline and groceries. Friendly reminder that the price of gasoline and groceries are now far higher than when the Stable Genius took office. 

Republicans who backed opening the region said the refuge would generate a multibillion-dollar windfall as soon as drillers were allowed inside the isolated habitat for polar bear, caribou and millions of migratory birds. 

Previous sales during the Stable Genius' first term also drew little interest. The handful of leases that had been sold were suspended, and then later canceled, by President Biden. 

In a separate anachronistic move, the Stable Genius announced the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars to revive the US coal industry. He cited the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era law that grants the president broad authority to support industries considered vital to national security, to justify the investment.

Some $500M in federal funds would go towards saving 14 existing coal plants and opening a new export terminal in California. The Department of Energy will grant a further $200M to build new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia, the first new plants in the US since 2013.

Wilderness oil leases and investments in coal at a time when global politics are demonstrating the weaknesses on the global fossil-fuel distribution system and the smart money is going into green energy. In China, the world's undisputed leader in renewable energy and clean technology, non-fossil fuels now make up the majority of the country's power capacity, driven by exponential growth in solar, wind, and hydropower.

The Stable Genius, his decaying mind still trapped somewhere in the 1970s, is taping leaves back on the trees in the hope of avoiding winter.