Eva wrote this, Herman approved it. December 20, 2006

Dear friends and family,

We bookended 2006 with trips to Nantucket for the annual Christmas count, always held there around New Year’s. In addition we took three one-week vacations, in March, August, and September, to South Florida, the Acadian region of Nova Scotia, and Wisconsin. The trips all combined birding with visiting friends and family. One bird we enjoyed in all three places was the belted kingfisher. We took in a Red Sox Spring Training game with Nancy and Jeff .

In Wisconsin we saw more than 150 Sandhill Cranes over 3 days driving county trunks from Baraboo to Mosinee to De Pere to Door County. Bluebirds were common wire birds. We should have kept exact tallies. We were also in Jefferson, Cambridge, Madison, and Mt Horeb WI.

We did keep an exact tally of the red-tailed hawks we saw driving from Rochester NY back to Boston on I-90 the Sunday after Thanksgiving: 51. In Florida the hawk we saw all the time was the red-shouldered hawk. That’s the hawk on the card.

In March I attended the Memorial Service of Dr. Paul Howard, 100. In April I re-cycled in my annual window display at the Go Club’s bank in Harvard Square the “Go has passed the test of time. It’s been played for 4000 years” blow-up of Paul playing Teddy. I directed a Go Tournament for the first time in July. Zack trained me in this new skill.

In Chicago, enroute to Wisconsin, we met for the first time Kathy and Tom’s grandchildren, Charlie and Eva Casey O’Keefe, and Beckett Glenn McCann.

In April Parametric Technology Corporation, a.ka. PTC, bought Mathsoft. In the Fall my workplace moved from Cambridge (ideal) to Needham (not). The final bash in the old office space was a Halloween Party.

Coopers’ Thanksgiving guests cooperated with my Christmas card project by carving crèche figures out of Ivory soap, but they all chose to do animals, except for the Hindu who fashioned a blocky Crucifix, which, on the cards where I used it, memorializes the fact that this was the year our good neighbor Audrey died unexpectedly a week before Christmas, and also the year of a Rhode Island funeral. Ezra carved the central crèche figures last Saturday when he passed through Boston enroute from Edinburgh to NY.

Audrey was A.T.’s best cat-sitter ever. He pre-deceased her by 2 months.

At the time of this writing Herman’s 2006 MA bird list stands at 309.

With deep appreciation for all of you this holiday season, we remain,

Our Florida page, book and movie lists, and the 2006 Go Windows, are on the web at

http://theworld.com/~eva. eva@theworld.com and herman@theworld.com.