2012-07-10 Caught The Culprit

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Late last year I put a piece of 12 AWG wire on the picnic table leg to hold up four LEDs that I use to convert sunlight to enough current to charge a 1 Farad capacitor and flash a LED.  For the last two or three weeks something (or someone) would come when I wasn’t watching and bend the wire over so it was no longer straight up.  When I would see this, I would go out and straighten it up.  Within a few hours or a day, whatever it was would come by and bend it over again when I wasn’t watching.  Sometimes I would see it straight, turn around to do something, and then a minute or two later it was bent!  I was getting extremely frustrated because it would happen suddenly and I didn’t see what happened.  I was beginning to think there was a ghost out there waiting until I wasn’t watching and it would bend it over.

This happened more than a dozen times, and finally I thought of a solution. I have a few meters of the Kevlar strength member that goes through the middle of a heavy underground fiber optic cable, and it is springy, just like the thin branch of a tree. It won’t bend, it will straighten back up and stay straight. I cut off about 30 inches of it and put it in place of the copper wire. For the last few days, the assembly has not bent, it has been straight and the LEDs have stayed pointing at the sky, like they’re supposed to.

Finally today I was looking out the window and a scrub jay flew over and landed on the springy whip, but it whipped up and down, and flipped back and forth, so the jay flew away and landed somewhere else. I finally caught the culprit! I had problems with bird poop on the bench, so I put screws in each leg and put a shiny platter from a hard disk on each leg (see the photo). These flop around if the bird tries to land on them. So my theory is that the jay couldn’t land on the other legs, so he got mad and decided to take revenge by landing on my wire and bending it over. But I got him back. Now every time he tries to land, he will get dizzy from bouncing up, down and around on the springy whip. I wonder what other way he will find to try to ruin my day?

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