Feb. 24. . Clear, but very cold and windy for the season. Northerly wind; smokes blown southerly. Ground frozen harder still; but probably now and hereafter what ground freezes at night will in great part melt by middle of day. However, it is so cold this afternoon that there is no melting of the ground throughout the day. -- Henry D. Thoreau

Journal of a Sabbatical

February 24, 1999

cats and goldeneyes

Blackjack got adopted already. He just got sprung from rabies quarantine last week and already he's got himself a nice new home. Keenan got adopted too. That rated an exclamation point on the board next to her name. Keenan's been there awhile and has almost as interesting a personality as Joey. Looks kinda like Joey too. Nice to see some of the long timer's find homes.

Jaguar has laxatone all over his chin. Bonnie tried to wash his face and brush out some of the matts in his fur but his patience didn't last long enough. Jaguar can only take so much human contact before he firmly draws the line. He's really looking old and frail to me these days. I petted him for awhile before I left to go to Eileen's goodbye lunch at Stripers. He head-butted me, which he rarely does. I guess I'm in with Jaguar these days.

Mr. H is in the hospital. He looked fine when he came in with the feral kitten he trapped last week. When I told Nancy tonight that he was in the hospital she immediately asked if he'd gotten rabies from the kitten. Don't know what's up. Bob volunteered to feed Mr. H's ferals at least one of the days this week.

After the Eileen goodbye lunch I went to Salisbury Beach to see if I could find any birds. I watched two male goldeneyes displaying for one female. I should say competing. She seemed to take no particular notice or at least made no response. The males seemed to respond to each other, keying off each other's displays and trying to go one better. They would thrust their heads way forward and thrust a couple of times and sort of bounce before tilting the head back and stretching the neck to about 4 times its apparent size and touching the back of the head to their backs. Their beaks pointed straight up to the sky. They did this quite vigorously for the approximately 20 minutes I watched before I got cold and got back in the car. Oddly, I felt the cold more today even though yesterday was way colder.

I saw a flock of 22 horned larks fly over what looked like perfectly good foraging territory to me and land in the middle of the (empty) parking lot. What is it they like about parking lots? They hunched down and pecked at the grass coming up through the cracks in the asphalt. If I hadn't seen them land there I never would have noticed them. They looked like tussocks of dried grass to the naked eye.