"Today I ..." was astounded at the resilience of a local humble Oz magpie.
There I was, happily internutting, when all of a sudden there was an Almighty bang from outside down the street and my internut connection dropped out.
"That sounded like overhead powerlines shorting or a step-down transformer blowing its knives and/or its guts" thinks I.
Strangely enough though, my notebook power supply stayed on, but a test of the lights revealed exceeding dimness ... a sign of a brownout/reduction in mains voltage.
Considering it was a clear blue sky without a puff of wind to blow lines together or trees into them, my next thought was "oh sh!t, the work-dudes building a house a couple of doors down, have accidentally hit the step-down transformer next to the building site" so I rush outside in my PJs to make sure everything is ok and if I could be of assistance.
Sure enough, the work-dudes ARE shouting at each other and pointing to near the transformer enclosure, but they all appear to be ok and no errant gear is near it.
Well, except for a limp black and white form and another more active one stalking around looking concerned at it.
Yeah, a pair of magpies, and prolly the two that were unhomed and used to play around the tree featured in the youtube in my last blog post which includes a clip of them chasing each other around between the branches.
Okay, here is the clip again:
Anyhoo, the work-dudes fuss around the downed magpie that had managed to arc/short-out the overhead 25kv AC supply to the step-down mains supply transformer with an Almighty Bang.
One of the work-dudes flips the unfortunate creature over and you know what ?
It gets back up to its feet.
I kid you not. I'm standing there in my PJs in the street watching from about 40metres away, and this creature that should be, for all intents and purposes, the pre-cooked filler for a magpie pie, gets back on its feet and just stands there looking like it is thinking the magpie equivelent of "WTF" ... which was clearly what we were all thinking.
So one of the work-dudes gets it a container of water and puts it near the stoned crow wannabe and before you know it, it stepped over to investigate the container contents.
Then its friend hops over to say "WTF mate, you ok ?" in magpie (yeah, it does the "do do do doodle doodle do" thing similar to what I captured in the youtube in my last blog post), and the recently mega-zapped tells it to bugger off for the moment coz it still has its buzz on ... IE, it zots its beak at it as if to say "don't stand so close to me".
Within about 5 minutes, it is wandering about the verge on which it crash landed from about 6 or 7 metres up to, so I go back inside to unplug things like TVs and fridges which don't like brownouts that much (underpower is WAY worse for electrical stuff than blackouts), and when I come back out, the magpie had wandered off completely and its mate was gone too.
I wonder if it, or its chicks, are now going to develop super powers ?
I'm also just simply amazed that it was able to survive being a living short-circuit to such a high voltage AND the concussive bang that happened when it pretended to be a switch. A short-circuit that took Western Power around two and a half hours to fix !
"Today I ..." am also LOLing at the irony of "der spatz" (the sparrow) being "booted" offline by a magpie getting a 25kv AC boot.
I mean, when it comes to little birds vs bigger birds, its usually the former that chase the latter off, yes ?
Oh, and one more.
"Today I ..." was also pleased to learn that a bull in a bullring in Spain decided it didn't want to play the game of being tortured to death for the amusement of a sick in the soul audience but instead decided to join them where they sat and teach some of them and their children a deserved lesson they are not likely to forget in a hurry.
Yay Magpie, and Yay Bull !
regarDS
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