Hoodrats, Darth Vader, and the tree snake of death!

Time for the next exciting installment of Sprightly the hood ornament for my car...
Well, in our last thrilling episode I mailed off a wax piece (as seen above) to Miles.

True to form, thrilling installment wise, it changed color and now appears pink!
Actually Miles made a mold of it since he was toying with the idea of doing a nickel plated one, so he'd need to be able to use it more than once. Since it's lost wax casting, if your original is wax, and you cast it, you lose it!
Darth Vader showed up and had to choke Miles into giving up the mouse, using only the power of his mind. As that pesky Darth is apt to do.
Favoring the dark side, Darth proceeded to waterboard poor Sprightly into revealing anything he might know about cheese, with particular reference to its potential uses as a chemical or biological weapon.

Darth is a shadow of his former self, taking on part time mouse torturing jobs between terrorizing whole planets of actual people these days. Seems Wall Street has had an intergalactic reach.
It's the silver sniffer! Now it just needs boxing up and sending to me for its next round of transformations...
Speaking of sniffing, this bird and nest were snapped outside our window a few days ago. Not sure what bird it is, but it was making a racket so I thought I'd see what was up.
And that brings us to the sniffing part.
A bull snake was up the tree having a nose about, making the bird very agitated.
I watch animal planet, so I know that snakes are deaf.
The bird is too busy hunting about for food to be bothered with tv, so it didn't realize it was wasting its energy in vocal protests at the snake.

The snake is kind of a pet of sorts, in so much as it seems to live in our garden (we spot it once or twice a year), and I like snakes.
Anyhow, since we also liked the idea of seeing baby birds growing up I popped outside and tried to get the snake down with a putter, but it shot straight up into the very spindly branches.
Really fast. I was a bit stunned.

The long pole for changing light bulbs too high to reach did the job, directing him down until I could grab him and drop him on the floor, where he slid under a pile of brush.

A day later the bird had left the nest, and after peeking a look inside via a makeup mirror taped to a stick there were no eggs either. So I guess the slithery fiend returned to claim his meal. Easier to catch than mice I suppose.