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April 6, 1999 |
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3 northern flickers |
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National Poetry Month Poet of the Day: Featured Site of the Day: April 6, 1999
Copyright © 1999, Janet I. Egan |
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I can't believe I left sewage treatment and dredged material management off my list of interests in yesterday's entry! April, as you may have noted by the sudden visibility of poetry in the chain bookstores, is National Poetry Month. Personally, I'm still waiting for National Short-eared Owl Month or maybe, dare I hope, National Piping Plover Month, but I'll settle for Poetry. With a capital P. I don't put much of my poetry in the journal. The online journaling community seems to be fairly anti-poetry or at least anti-poet and I respect that. I'm not that keen on reading a lot of adolescent angst masquerading as poetry either. Besides that, I'm sort of in agreement with my friend Tom who insists that poetry is a performance art - it's about the spoken word not the typeset word. But maybe... we'll see... check back later in the month. Meanwhile I have provided some poetry links to at least acknowledge the month. The sky is that blue again - the one people move here for - and the birds are everywhere. I have a good book to read. I picked up The Adventure of Birds by Charlton Ogburn at Old Port Bookshop on Friday and am really getting into it. Ogburn is the same guy who wrote The Winter Beach, one of my all time fave natural history books. I never would have found The Adventure of Birds had not Domino, the bookstore's cat, led me to it. Domino is the best salesman they've got. I'm standing there browsing the travel and local history sections and Domino walks right up to me and starts meowing and rubbing and doing the "follow me" routine. I can't resist a cat who wants to be petted and I was going to go downstairs to browse anyway, so I obliged Domino and headed downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs, instead of leading me to the back room by the Bobbsey Twins section and the food dishes, Domino jumped up on a stool in the nature section and meowed - right in front of a shelf full of bird books. I petted Domino, who rolled over on the stool, and browsed. The Adventure of Birds practically leaped off the shelf at me. I had to buy it. Domino hasn't steered me wrong yet - it was Domino who led me to Winter: From the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by HGO Blake. I had some vague intention to sit in Starbucks after therapy and read The Adventure of Birds until my parking meter ran out. Instead I ate my lunch and talked with Dan and Geri and Hussein, and then gave in to the irresistible urge to look for birds instead. The next thing I knew I was at the refuge handing Kurt my duck stamp and scanning the list of recent sightings. The first flicker I encountered was perched on the side of a granite pillar in the middle of a flock of starlings and robins. Before I got out the binoculars, I knew it wasn't a starling or robin by the size and the way it stood on the side of the pillar. I wondered what on earth kind of woodpecker feeds on granite. Once I had it in focus and determined that it was indeed a yellow-shafted northern flicker, it flew off. Must've had a sudden insight that you can't get grub from a stone :-) Two more flickers, acting more normal by pecking on trees instead of granite, turned up further down the road. Two Eastern meadowlarks were foraging on the ground among another flock of robins in the big open field next to the Pines Trail. While I was watching them, four sparrows, which I've yet to identify, hopped onto the fence really close to me. I studied the sparrows for a long time as them flew around, hopped around, and just generally made themselves hard to get a good look at. I get frustrated when a bird is that close and I can't get a good look. I want to tell them to sit still for a minute. One of them looked like a seaside sparrow but the the other three just didn't click with my brain. I looked at the book, looked at them, looked at the book, and so on until I lost track of time and got sunburned. I'm pretty sure none of them was the recently sighted fox sparrow but beyond that, they'll remain the ones that got away. The sparrows were a happy, challenging frustration. The world of software is not. BiB e-mailed me a photo - my very own "Entering the Republic of Srpska" sign - and my birthday isn't 'til Thursday - encoded in Microsoft TNEF format. Oops. I don't have Outlook. Eudora can't read it. MacLinkPlus can't translate it. Darn a new Microsoft conspiracy to enhance its monopoly power by forcing everyone to switch to Outlook. Grrr. I decided maybe it was time to upgrade to Eudora Pro 3.1 or whatever the current version is, so I purchased same at beyond.com and proceeded to download it. It made it 71% of the way through the download before the link had some kind of seizure and it stopped loading. I waited awhile and tried again. This time I couldn't even connect to the page. I wrote e-mail to BiB thanking him for the thoughtful photo and went off to buy cat food. Later that same evening: the e-mail bounced. I double-checked the address and sent it again. It bounced again. But the second attempt at the download of the new Eudora is 96% done and still going. And I'd better get to bed real soon now... |
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