It’s gone in a moment, but savor that brief balance of night and day. mjh

I am NOT a birder. Birders have life-lists and binoculars. Birders are early-risers. Birders plan their vacations around the northern extent of the trogon (Chiricauhuas) or where to see 47 varieties of hummingbirds (Ramsey Canyon). Birders systematically memorize field marks like trailing white on the wing to distinguish the resurrected Ivory-billed woodpecker from the pileated.

Granted, corvus is on my totem and birds figure in my photos, dreams and poems. I loved Burt Lancaster as The Birdman of Alcatraz and cried a bit during The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill; I’m one of the few people to stay awake during the Kestrel’s Eye. Every day I watch for the neighborhood road runners and hawks. I think turkey vultures are wonderful and deserve to be respected as condors. And, yes, I can distinguish an Inca dove from a white-winged dove. So what if I recognize the dipping flight of flickers and several different sounds made by robins, the dandelions of birds — who doesn’t?

You’re thinking I’m in denial, but I deny that. I’m just a hanger-on, an occasionally alert friend to birders. I’m not a birder, a dancer, a musician or a lawyer — even though all my friends are.

And when my friends head to Ecuador this fall to see birds, I’m just going for the fun of it all. I’ll be damned if I’ll start a life-list. mjh

PS: Last night, I sat among 200+ bird nerds listening to my friend, Dave Mehlman, talk about the Ivory-bill. Afterwards, a man behind me said, “he’s pretty funny for a bird guy.” Dave has been our bird guy on three expeditions to Bosque del Apache and one to the Monticello Box.

PPS: Today, acting on a tip from an Audubon member, we looked for the recently-relocated yellow grosbeak in the side yard of a friend. That this Mexican bird has never been seen in New Mexico really rocks the birders’ cradle — or so they tell me. Here’s Merri’s account.

This morning I dreamed I was walking through some tree. Small owls flew at me randomly, not threateningly but much more directly than one would expect.

Continue reading Joy — Terror — Joy! →

Mela

Kalikimaka –R. Alex Anderson

Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say
On a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day
That’s the island

greeting that we send to you
From the land where palm trees sway
Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright
The sun to

shine by day and all the stars at night
Mele Kalikimaka is Hawaii’s way
To say “Merry Christmas to you.”

As we all well know, tonight is the longest night,

counterpart to the day with the shortest period of daylight. (Oddly, it is not the day with the latest sunrise or earliest sunset —

those occur a bit before or after the solstice.)

Enjoy the long darkness and the recurring promise of the other half of the cycle,

with daylight stretching towards warmth and growth. Nothing is more sacred nor worshipful than this: Season’s Greetings! mjh

PS: Precision freaks may like knowing that Winter begins at 11:35am. I accept that we can measure the time

any point on Earth’s elliptical orbit occurs, but I’ll be marking the Solstice from sunset to sunrise.