Flying things: Airships and Orioles

I was watering in the garden this morning when a loud humming approached from behind me. I looked up and was surprised to see a sizable airship flying right over the house and at a fairly good clip. I was able to photograph it only from directly below, so I couldn't see any identifying markings. A morning UFO*. 

Among other flying things, I recently saw two pairs of Hooded Orioles popping in and out of a stand of large palm trees. Palm trees seem to be their favorite place to nest. I suspect babies are on the way. I wasn't able to photograph one of the bright orange males, but I got a couple of nice shots of the Mrs. 

I've also included a portrait of a handsome Western Fence Lizard that obligingly posed atop a cactus pad for me.

*Edit: According to my friend Monica Schwalbenberg-Peña, this is the Pathfinder 1, which, she says (according to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics), is at present the world's largest aircraft (406.5 feet long, 66 feet wide). Apparently it runs on electricity and it has a rigid outer hull, unlike a blimp, which uses an expandable bag of pressurized gas for buoyancy. 

  

Books I'm Reading: The Great Dirigibles: Their Triumphs and Disasters

A Dover publication of a text originally published in 1957, I picked this up somewhere long ago and finally read it over a recent weekend. John Toland's The Great Dirigibles: Their Triumphs and Disasters is not very well titled. It would be better called The Great Dirigibles: One Disaster after Another, as the author spends little time talking about the successful flights of these once-great airships. The book is mostly a telling of how some of the most famous of them met their ends—in great detail, based on eyewitness accounts. If nothing else, this book makes it clear just how fragile and dangerous dirigibles (especially hydrogen-filled dirigibles) were.