mark your calendar, count some birds

the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is doing their annual bird count this weekend, February 16-19. go outside and look around, then go to their website and tell them what you saw. they'll take your word for it.

last year’s count brought in like 60,000 checklists and reported 7.5 million birds overall, 623 different species. one of the things revealed was the ongoing range expansion of introduced Eurasian Collared-Doves which are now living in my neighborhood too. entries are accepted until the end of the month and there are some prizes you can win like binoculars and, um, “cherry cobbler bird food.”

fishers of sharks

Reverend Kevin Thompson just got busted. he’d been recruiting fishermen from among his disciples instead of the other way around and now he’s going to jail for a year and a day. here’s the USDoJ release. when the faithful would ask if things were legit, he told them it was the will of God.

if you want to hear him talk about the operation and "some discovery channel stuff,” all in a light brogue, then you can easily download a terrific little 7 minute mp3 here. it’s an excerpt from a longer sermon where he gets into, as he puts it, a deep spiritual lesson he learned from sharks and the unique business of catching little baby sharks. he leaves out the part about baby leopard sharks growing to about 7 feet.

happy birthday Galway Kinnell

Daybreak
On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity they sank down
into the mud; they faded down
into it and lay still: and by the time
pink sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.


The Gray Heron
It held its head still
while its body and green
legs wobbled in wide arcs
from side to side. When
it stalked out of sight,
I went after it, but all
I could find where I was
expecting to see the bird
was a three-foot-long lizard
in ill-fitting skin
and with linear mouth
expressive of the even temper
of the mineral kingdom.
It stopped and tilted its head,
which was much like
a fieldstone with an eye
in it, which was watching me
to see if I would go
or change into something else.

-Galway Kinnell
from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words
1980