So we have just gone through an interesting time here at our campground in Hermon, just outside of Bangor. When Jan checked us in she was warned that they had 4 pairs of Killdeer families with nests all around the park, and one of them was on our site. They are plovers and have some unique attributes, they lay their eggs in gravel since the eggs blend in very well, and they protect the nest by coming towards a predator then running away, making it look like they have a broken wing. Very interesting at first but after the 8th day of it when even getting within 25 feet of the nest is a little much. Back to the story, the nest is right in the middle of our site, I try to pull in to straddle it and pull forward, but it won't work, so I back out, pull around in front and back into our site, and then there was enough room to park the truck behind the nest.
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| You can see the Killdeer on its nest, the blue bag is just to bring attention to it |
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| The broken wing act |
And after we'd been there for 8 days the hatching began, the amazing thing is the babies stay in the nest only for a matter of a few hours then start walking and feeding immediately, and they look like miniatures of their parents within hours!
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| Immediately after hatching |
Bottom line to our saga, 3 babies hatched, one was run over, not by us, and one egg that didn't hatch, and now they are all gone. They sure provided a lot of entertainment.
One of the very first things we did was wash the motorhome, roof and all, it had been a long time, then after it was dry the following day Jan went up and put a third coat of Rustoleum Topside paint on, which has worked out very well for us.
We took a ride down to Ellsworth to go to a fish market and went to a pretty good pizza place for lunch, Zeppa's.
Finally our new diodes came so we could tackle rewiring the truck lights. A burp in the shipping of the first order made it necessary to reorder putting everything off more than a week.
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| One of the new diodes |
The original homemade diodes wired incorrectly.
One side done.
Then much to our astonishment and disappointment we found something else, the original installer had removed some of the insulation in order to make his connections to his homemade diodes:-(
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| You can see the removed insulation in this picture |
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| And when removed left me very little wire to work with |
But we got it all done, wrapped up tight, and checked the lights and found they work perfectly now.
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| All done |
Only one more thing to do, go out to lunch to one of favorite places nearby, Angler's, great food, one of the very best haddock sandwiches we have ever had, onion rings that are awesome, fantastic haddock chowder, and wonderful baked scallops, not to mention all the other wonderful things on the menu.
But the highlight of the lunch was we were joined by our friend's Doug and Nancy which made it into a wonderful visit and great time!
