Of Pigeons, Potter, and other Wonderful Things

A few different things. First an update on the pigeons. The nest you've seen is at the base of a roof. As I've said, pretty much anywhere a pigeon could land is covered in spikes to keep them from landing and crapping on everyone on the deck. At night the mother would usually sit on the chicks in the nest. Now they've gotten too big...and there is really only one place for the mom to sleep...

...the sprinkler head. You can see the spikes lining everything else. It's only a matter of time before the chicks will need to learn to fly.

On Friday night we realized that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince came out at midnight in most cities. Lucky for us that included Bar Harbor. They even had a costume parade at 11:15 that we missed out on. Seth, Deanna, Andrea, Sarah, Decklan, and Pat all went down to Sherman's even though only three of us were going to buy the book.

The line was huge...until we found out a majority of the line was for people who had reserved the book. This was great, and in our favor. They had one line for reservations, two lines for people buying.

Here's me giving Seth the gift of Reading!

We were only in this line shortly when an employee came to grab us and said there was a shorter line. She was right. I think the worst wait was for the people with reservations.

We were in an out in no time (Deanna, me, Sara, Seth). Coincidentally, we took wayyyy to many pictures of this with way to many people's camera's. They're books....books.

The next day (Saturday...technically the same day as the Harry Potter purchase since it was after midnight) Deanna and I went to the Mt. Desert Oceanarium. It was kind of rickety, but interesting. They had a touch tank with a guy who told all about everything in the tank. We got to hold sea cucumber, star fish, sand dollar, sea urchin, horseshoe crab, moon snail, and this thing called a Sea Squirt. Probably the most interesting thing to me was when he was talking about sea urchins. Urchins are use in sushi, but seagulls like them too. Seagulls will grab an urchin, fly up, and drop it on rocks to break it open. That isn't the interesting part. The thing that intrigued me was how to stop them from doing that...

...just do this. Apparently there are a lot of urchins AND seagulls near the Oceanarium. The seagulls were smart enough to know that the parking lot and cars were hard surfaces and would drop urchins down. There was probably a lot of crapping in the process as well. Apparently though, seagulls can't see that well. By simply painting that simple silhouette, the seagulls stay away. They won't drop anything in the lot because they actually think it's another seagull waiting to steal their food.

OR...you can go with the story an old lobster fisherman told me. When a sailor dies untimely, his sole is sometimes brought back by The Gull. Where the sailor goes, he leaves his mark. I think this story is true.