Backyard Buddies

24 shots of Finches and Redwings in Swink, March 2013:

Backyard Buddies

Farmstyle Cottage Cheese bread

Two pound loaf:

1 1/8 cups water (warm, for the yeast)
1 cup small-curd lowfat cottage cheese
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 1/4 cups bread flour
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
3 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon gluten
2 teaspoons salt
2 1/2 teaspoons SAF yeast or 1 tablespoon bread machine yeast

Put the ingredients into the machine in the order specified by your machine's instructions.

Use water that is warm to the touch, and warm the cottage cheese, too. This keeps the yeast happy.

Use the Basic cycle, medium crust.

The doughball should be moist. If after the first knead cycle it looks a bit dry add a bit more water. A teaspoon to a tablespoon is usually enough.

This one is excellent lightly toasted with butter, or peanut butter, and any good fruit jam, jelly, or preserve.

From The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook, page 371.

Note: the olive oil has a great influence on the flavor of this bread. In addition to the usual grades of oil - extra-virgin; pure; and lite - there are Italians, French, Sicilian, Greek, and others. All have distinctive flavors that will be quite noticeable in olive oil breads.

Mary Lee checks in

After her two-day 'run silent, run deep' routine, Mary Lee is frisking about on the surface, with five pings this morning as she cruises back and forth in short sprints.

She has made her way well south of Bermuda, about 600 miles SSW, more or less. She is 550 miles east of Vero Beach, FL, out in the open Atlantic, over water that is 13,000 - 14,000 feet deep.

Update: as of the morning of 03.15.2013, Mary Lee has crossed over the Hatteras Abyss, which has depths in excess of 19,000 feet. She is angling toward the west northwest, approaching Blake Ridge and the Blake Plateau. 

OCEARCH Tracker

Mary Lee continues south

She's about 60 miles SW of Bermuda now, running along the surface over some deep water. According to this abstract, the water in that general area is about 14,000 feet deep.

Here is an interesting article that details behaviors of several great whites tagged and tracked back around 1999 -2002:

Great white sharks migrate thousands of miles

A couple of excerpts:

Satellite tagging data confirmed that, in the fall, white sharks appear near coastal seal rookeries at Año Nuevo and the Farallones just as young elephant seals arrive to rest prior to the annual mating ritual of adult seals. Data showed that, while near shore, tagged sharks rarely dove more than 90 feet (30 meters) below the surface, swimming in temperate waters that ranged from 50 F to 57.2 F (10 C and 14 C).

and

Pop-up satellite tags also revealed interesting diving patterns among the four sharks during their transit across the open sea. While they sometimes dove as far as 2,040 feet (680 meters) below sea level, the animals seemed to prefer swimming at two discrete depths -- one within 15 feet (5 meters) of the surface, the other 900 to 1,500 feet (300 to 500 meters) down.
All four sharks spent up to 90 percent of the day in these two diving zones and little time at intermediate depths, according to the Nature study.