Regruntled.com

A free-falling skydiver offers lunch to a peregrine falcon.

The Life of the Skies, by Jonathan Rosen, is subtitled “Birding at the End of Nature”. It is nominally about bird-watching, but really about a symbolic interaction with nature.  The author points out that birds are the only wild animals that most people ever see, which is not exactly true.  Squirrels are an easy counter-example, and depending on where one lives, one may see deer, or lizards, or whales.  However, birds can fly over fences and across borders, so the bird in your back yard may have come from thousands of miles away.  I think it would be more accurate to say that there is not much wilderness left, and migratory birds are the closest connection that most of us have with that wilderness.

And so the author touches on poetry, literature and philosophy.  He rambles from Thoreau to Whitman to Frost, from Audobon’s drawings to Darwin’s finches, from Adam’s naming the birds in Eden to modern birders with their classification, nomenclature and life lists.  In between the more abstract discussions, he takes us on canoe trips through Louisiana and Arkansas looking for the ivory-billed woodpecker.  And yet, even here the birds are symbolic.  The search is real enough, but the birds may or may not exist.

About the only the thing he doesn’t discuss is the symbolism of dreams.  For example, I don’t dream about birds, or about being a bird, but I do dream about flying.  Maybe I like birds just because they can fly, and it has nothing to do with a connection with nature.  Flying symbolizes freedom, as in free as a you-know-what. 

Well.  My review is all over the place, which is appropriate because Rosen’s book is all over the place.  It’s a fantastic book, but it’s not for everybody.  I hope I’ve either piqued your interest or warned you off.

The Koleas (Pacific Golden Plovers) are back from their summer breeding grounds in Alaska.  This particular bird, of course, may have been born in Alaska, in which case he’s not back, he’s here for the first time.  Being an early bird, one of the first arrivals, he had his choice of worm-hunting territory.  If he inadvertently staked out an area belong to another bird, he’ll have to defend his claim or move on.

In April, I took some photos of a Kolea just before he left for Alaska.  Same area, perhaps the same bird.  In April, the Koleas had their formal black and white plumage, and were bulking up for the flight.  In August, they’re wearing their casual feathers and are considerably thinner after the long flight.  If you think airline food is bad, try migrating under your own power.

See: Kolea for the April photos.

I’ve seen these guys before, usually just a flash of green in the corner of my eye and then they’re gone.  Occasionally I’ve seen one standing still when I didn’t have a camera handy.  This time I had the camera, and there were half a dozen parrots hanging out in a tree.

Yo quiero Pachelbel!

This is the same baby albatross as in the earlier post. It’s a few weeks older and able to stay home alone while the parents look for food. Not much of a picture, but the albatross wouldn’t come out and pose for me.

== Follow-up to: Brave new albatross

This Common Waxbill, Estrilda astrild, was sitting in the driveway of a parking garage. Frequent commenter CET stopped by for lunch, and we found the bird on the pavement. The bird showed no obvious signs of injury, but it seemed lethargic and didn’t resist being picked up. Perhaps it was stunned after flying into a windshield.

We put the bird in a two-quart sprouting jar with some shredded sudokus and covered the jar with a towel. The bird just sat there. The mouth of the jar is about 3 inches, so you can see that this is a tiny bird. My guess is that it is a juvenile, fully fledged but not adult size yet.

After a couple of hours, we took off the towel and it had recovered enough to try to get out. After a photo shoot, we put the jar next to a hedge and the bird hopped out into the hedge and flew away soon after. All in all, the whole experience was probably pretty traumatic for the bird, but we got a close look and the bird didn’t get run over by a car.