Tasmanian.Kris has added a photo to the pool:
Two birds working the shoreline like it’s a daily appointment. Heads down, methodical, not much fuss. Beaches are full of these quiet routines if you hang around long enough.
Tasmanian.Kris has added a photo to the pool:
Just a small shape against a wide, empty sky. It’s almost nothing, which is exactly why it works. The space does most of the talking.
Tasmanian.Kris has added a photo to the pool:
Two birds working the shoreline like it’s a daily appointment. Heads down, methodical, not much fuss. Beaches are full of these quiet routines if you hang around long enough.
Tasmanian.Kris has added a photo to the pool:
A lone bird holding court on that chunk of rock like it paid for the lease. The layers of hills behind it fade out gently, which keeps the whole thing calm. There’s something reassuring about a vantage point that doesn’t need to try too hard.
Tasmanian.Kris has added a photo to the pool:
A gull suspended in that pale sky, wings stretched like it’s working something out. The simplicity does the job here. No distractions, just flight and a bit of quiet control.
Tasmanian.Kris has added a photo to the pool:
Wings out, body steady, the whole mechanism of flight laid bare. It’s a clean, almost textbook moment, but still feels earned. These birds make difficult things look routine.
Fat Burns ☮ has added a photo to the pool:
Many thanks for the visits, faves and comments. Cheers
White-necked Heron
Scientific Name: Ardea pacifica
Description: The White-necked Heron is a large heron with a white head and a long white neck with a double line of black spots running down the front. The upperparts of the body are slate-black, with plum-coloured nuptial plumes on the back and breast during the breeding season. Underparts are grey streaked with white. The bill is black, the naked facial skin is is blue or yellow, the eyes are green, and the legs and feet are black. The White-necked Heron is sometimes known as the Pacific Heron.
Similar species: The Pied Heron, A. picata, is a similar slate-black heron with contrasting white throat and neck, but it is a much smaller (43 cm - 52 cm) bird, with a crested dark cap that extends below the eyes, yellow legs, and a bill that is mostly yellow.
Distribution: The White-necked Heron is distributed throughout mainland Australia, inhabiting mainly fresh water wetlands.
Habitat: Although White-necked Herons are sometimes seen in tidal areas, most are found in shallow fresh waters, including farm dams, flooded pastures, claypans, and even roadside ditches.
Seasonal movements: White-necked Herons have regular winter or spring movements in many areas, but little is known of their patterns of movement.
Feeding: White-necked Herons feed by wading in shallow water or stalking through wet grass looking for fish, amphibians, crustaceans and insects. Like other herons, the White-necked Heron has a special hinge mechanism at the sixth vertebra that allows them to rapidly extend their folded neck and so catch unwary prey.
Breeding: White-necked Herons will breed in any month of the year in response to good rain, but most breeding occurs between September and December. The nest is a loose platform in a living tree such as a river red gum near or over water. The nests may be solitary or in loose colonies. Eggs are incubated by both parents.
Calls: A loud croak is uttered as an alarm call. Other gutteral calls are uttered at the nest.
Minimum Size: 76cm
Maximum Size: 106cm
Average size: 91cm
Average weight: 900g
Breeding season: Mainly September to December.
Clutch Size: Up to six, usually three or four.
Incubation: 30 days
Nestling Period: 45 days
(Source: www.birdsinbackyards.net)
© Chris Burns 2026
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This image may not be copied, reproduced, distributed, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying and recording without my written consent.
More than 190 people have been killed in such strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific
The US military on Friday said it struck a vessel in the eastern Pacific, killing two people and leaving one survivor in the latest attack on boats suspected of transporting narcotics. This brings the death toll from strikes on such vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific to more than 190 people since September.
A video posted by the US Southern Command shows the vessel traveling through the water being hit by what appears to be a missile. The screen momentarily goes black and then shows the boat engulfed in flames.
Continue reading...President and his party celebrate as Democrats vow to fight Virginia court ruling barring state from enacting new voter-approved congressional maps – key US politics stories from 8 May 2026 at a glance
Virginia’s supreme court on Friday ruled that the state cannot use new congressional maps approved by voters to help Democrats gain as many as four new seats in the US House of Representatives, handing Republicans a major win before November’s midterm elections.
In a 4-3 decision, the court found that the state’s general assembly did not follow the appropriate constitutional procedure in approving the map, which voters then passed in a referendum last month.
Continue reading...Always one step ahead, the new wave innovators are not done yet – and their hair is bigger than ever
Many things can kill you in the music business. For Split Enz, New Zealand’s first internationally successful rock group, the most lethal poison was hairspray – or it should have been. “How did I not die?” marvels bandleader Tim Finn, whose head – at its vertiginous peak – resembled an upturned paintbrush.
Sitting next to him, percussionist Noel Crombie grins as Finn continues the story. “Noel would lacquer merciless amounts of this toxic spray … the makeup would start to run but the hair would just somehow … sit there.”
Continue reading...
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Longtime Slashdot reader cellocgw writes: Hiding inside another layoff report, Fidelity is reorganizing: "The changes are aimed at moving the teams away from an 'agile' makeup -- comprising smaller, siloed squads -- and toward larger teams built to move faster on projects." OMG, as they say: "Sudden outbreak of common sense." According to the Boston Globe, Fidelity is cutting about 1,000 jobs even as it plans to hire roughly 5,300 new workers, many of them early-career engineers. Half of the 3,300 new workers hired this year "will be in tech or product-related roles," the report says, noting that "about 2,000 of those jobs are currently open, and 400 of them are in tech/product-delivery."
"The company also plans to add almost 2,000 new early-career workers, with the goal of making the tech and product-delivery teams more hands-on. In all, that means roughly 5,300 new jobs in the pipeline for Fidelity." The company says AI isn't driving the shift; as cellocgw noted, it's about moving toward larger teams that Fidelity says can move faster on priority projects.
The financial services firm also reported a strong 2025 under CEO Abigail Johnson, with managed assets rising 19% from 2024 to $7.1 trillion and revenue climbing 15% to $37.7 billion. "Throughout the company's history, our investments in technology have fueled our growth and customer service capabilities," Johnson wrote in a letter (PDF) included in the company's annual report. "We will continue to prioritize technology initiatives that help us advance digital capabilities, simplify our technology ecosystem, and protect the firm and our customers."
"The company also plans to add almost 2,000 new early-career workers, with the goal of making the tech and product-delivery teams more hands-on. In all, that means roughly 5,300 new jobs in the pipeline for Fidelity." The company says AI isn't driving the shift; as cellocgw noted, it's about moving toward larger teams that Fidelity says can move faster on priority projects.
The financial services firm also reported a strong 2025 under CEO Abigail Johnson, with managed assets rising 19% from 2024 to $7.1 trillion and revenue climbing 15% to $37.7 billion. "Throughout the company's history, our investments in technology have fueled our growth and customer service capabilities," Johnson wrote in a letter (PDF) included in the company's annual report. "We will continue to prioritize technology initiatives that help us advance digital capabilities, simplify our technology ecosystem, and protect the firm and our customers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
BrianFagioli writes: Micron says it is now shipping the world's highest-capacity commercially available SSD, and the numbers are honestly hard to wrap your head around. The new Micron 6600 ION packs 245TB into a single drive and is aimed squarely at AI infrastructure, hyperscalers, and cloud providers dealing with exploding data growth. According to the company, the SSD can reduce rack counts by 82 percent compared to HDD deployments offering similar raw capacity, while also cutting power usage and cooling requirements. Micron says the drive tops out at roughly 30W, which it claims is about half the power draw of comparable hard drive setups.
The announcement also feels like another warning sign for spinning disks in the enterprise. Hard drives still dominate bulk storage because of lower cost per terabyte, but SSD capacities keep climbing into territory that used to belong exclusively to HDDs. Micron is also touting major performance gains, claiming up to 84 times better energy efficiency for AI workloads and dramatically lower latency versus HDD-based systems. While nobody is dropping one of these into a home NAS anytime soon, the idea of a quarter petabyte on a single SSD no longer sounds like science fiction.
The announcement also feels like another warning sign for spinning disks in the enterprise. Hard drives still dominate bulk storage because of lower cost per terabyte, but SSD capacities keep climbing into territory that used to belong exclusively to HDDs. Micron is also touting major performance gains, claiming up to 84 times better energy efficiency for AI workloads and dramatically lower latency versus HDD-based systems. While nobody is dropping one of these into a home NAS anytime soon, the idea of a quarter petabyte on a single SSD no longer sounds like science fiction.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
