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July 5, 2003 bird-watching Each time I consider retiring this journal, I encounter a groundswell of support for its continuation.  Okay, it might not be a groundswell, but I definitely detect swelling, not to mention moderate discoloration.  So I press on, out of gas and running on fumes, waiting for my Muse to return from her smoke break which, according to my watch, has already been three months long.  She may have died of lung cancer for all I know. Forty percent of my wakened state--about ten hours a day, when you consider my insomnia--is spent staring out the window at Nature.  How she came by the name Nature, I'll never know; but she looks to be about twenty and, with my binoculars, I can see into her bedroom in the house across the park.  To say she is fit is to say Paul Prudhomme is not.  Her exercise regimen blends nude pilates with modern dance, yoga, and macrame. I also delight in the wide variety of feathered birds that visit my feeders.  Each species has behavioral traits peculiar to it and there is no deviation from the trait by individual birds within each species.  They're like street gangs in that respect, Jets and Sharks, Crips and Bloods, Capulets and Montagues.  Mockingbirds are smart and fearless.  Cardinals are monogamous, if not down right codependent; the ball-cardinal is never seen without the chain-cardinal, and vice versa.  Doves are stupid, blue jays are assholes, and so forth.  Recently, I was visited by a bird I could not identify.  I knew it was a woodpecker what with the pecking on wood and all, but I could not find in my reference book a woodpecker matching its coloration.  It had a dark gray head with gray and white wings.  I was stumped until I saw two of them on a tree limb, side-by-side, looking directly at me.  The one on my right lifted his right wing behind the back of the bird on my left and, separating two end-feathers in a "V," created "devil horns" above the head of the other.  The reference book confirmed I was watching immature male red-headed woodpeckers, birds whose heads turn red when they grow up.

©  2003 by the beastmaster