Journal of a Sabbatical

September 11, 1998

green heron

Birds:

1 belted kingfisher
3 northern mocking birds
120 semipalmated sandpipers
1 double crested cormorant
3 greater yellow legs
2 willets
1 green-backed heron
100 tree swallows
26 Canada geese
1 black crowned night heron (juvenile)
6 snowy egrets
1 mourning dove
herring gulls
black backed gulls
ring billed gulls

Copyright © 1998, Janet I. Egan

No, this isn't a green heron, it's a house sparrow perched on my fence. There were three of them sitting in a row this morning when I came out of the house but when I got close enough to snap a picture, two of them left. This is the bravest of the three. Some days they line the whole fence, one on each post, and don't even move when I open and close the gate.

Once again, I put off working and went birding. It was not as windy as yesterday and the sky was even bluer. I sat at the Hellcat dike by the beaver dam for a long time. I didn't realize how many hours has passed. A belted kingfisher sat on top of the beaver dam the whole time. It never moved. Must not be any fish it feels like eating in there. Birds of all kinds came and went through a very small space. I was amazed at how many different species I could count just around the beaver dam, not even the whole rest of the Hellcat area. A green heron (or green-backed heron depending on which book you look in) landed right in front of the beaver dam. The kingfisher still didn't move. The green heron stood stock still, darted forward, grabbed something too small for me to see, stood stock still again. This happened several times. When the green heron grew tired of this, it climbed up the woodpile of the beaver dam. Only then did the kingfisher move - to another spot about a foot away.

Two mockingbirds got into a fight over the right to perch on the refuge boundary sign. They pecked at each other and bleated in the most unmelodious voices until one gave in and flew down to the ground where it did that shoulder shrugging thing they do. Both birds looked really rumpled and worn, as if their feathers needed pressing. The defeated one flew back up to the sign and perched again as I was walking back to my car. I don't know if the battle started up again.

On the reading front, I still am not reading very fast but I finished Spartina on Wednesday. I really enjoyed it despite its main theme being a male midlife crisis. The descriptions of the salt marsh and the sea and the hurricane as well as the undercurrent of class rage in Rhode Island all rang true. I had to keep checking the publication date because I couldn't believe he wasn't describing Hurricane Bob (he couldn't have been though, 'cause Spartina won the National Book Award in 1989 and Hurricane Bob came ashore in 1991). There are a few minor things that don't ring true - for example, he way underestimates the effect of post-Hurricane of 1938 trauma on the minds and imaginations of the people - but the language and the tone of the book make it almost gem-like - bright, concentrated, focused.

I started Glass, Paper, Beans, which I picked up at the Brown Bookstore on Monday and I've already got a long list of words I have to look up in the dictionary. Maybe that's why I read so slowly - I have to look up words I don't understand.

reification

noun form of reify

reify

to treat an abstraction as substantially existing or as a concrete material object

sluer

hmm, can't find this one - from context it has something to do with glass making

slue

to turn or swing around a pivot or a fixed point
well, that's the closest I could find to sluer but I can't figure out what that has to do with glass

stumpage

1. standing timber, especially with reference to its value; 2. the right to cut such timber

Glass, Paper, Beans is an extended meditation on the nature and value of ordinary things - the newspaper & coffee in glass tumbler at the Someday Cafe. I've never read anything else by Leah Hager Cohen but I'll probably have to now. Anybody who can get a whole book out of a glass of coffee at the Someday is some writer.