Ellie Barr puts out plenty of birdseed to make the wild quail welcome around her Yakima home, but she hardly expected any to nest beside the engine in her sport utility vehicle.
Barr, a recovery room nurse at Washington Cascade Surgery Center, said she hadn’t looked under the hood of her Suzuki Vitara in months before going to add some windshield washer fluid on Saturday.
In a flat spot over the driver’s-side wheel well was a foot-wide tangle of twigs containing several bits of quail feathers and three cream-colored, speckled quail eggs. A fourth egg was visible outside the nest, apparently having been dislodged while the SUV was in motion.
Much as she likes the chubby little birds, she got rid of the quail nest on the spot for fear that it could ignite and start an engine fire.
“I think there was probably a quail following me to work, going, ‘Wait, wait! My babies are in there!’ “
Corn message seemed better than a personal ad
It sounds a little corny.
A Canandaigua, N.Y., farmer looking for love has planted a personal ad using corn stalks in a cow pasture. It reads: “S.W.F GoT-2 (love symbol) FARM-N.”
Underneath is a 1,000-foot-long arrow pointing single females to his house.
“It only took me about an hour – I did it with a corn planter in May,” Pieter DeHond said Wednesday as he removed weeds from the 18-acre field. “I was just horsing around.”
In place of a newspaper ad, DeHond said, he decided on an impulse to use up the extra corn seed left after spring planting at his 200-acre farm in western New York.
“I wouldn’t place a personal ad in the paper. To me it seems desperate,” he said.
His appeal has already drawn quite a few phone calls and e-mails.
Sending used bubble gum is gross, but not felonious
It was disgusting. But it wasn’t a felony.
A New Mexico dental student who sent some chewed bubble gum along with a money order to pay a speeding ticket has been found innocent of two felony counts of mailing a threat.
The wad of bubble gum was treated as a hazardous materials incident when a worker at the Santa Fe Motor Vehicle Division office opened the envelope. A note with the gum read: “Caution: Touch at your own risk or use gloves. Ha-ha.”
An attorney for Rosemary Ho, 24, argued it was “the stupid act of a young girl,” not a terrorist threat. The federal jury agreed.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Amy Sirignano had said the state employee did not think Ho’s note was a joke and that the worker reacted “the way any reasonable public employee would.”
From Herald news services
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