Tag: Birds

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Insomnia and Ducks, Redux (Part Deux)

Behind Schoolhouse Falls, Pantertown, North Carolina
My Dad Behind Schoolhouse Falls, Panthertown, North Carolina

Well, dear reader, it happened again.

I opened my damn mouth, wearing a law school sweatshirt, and I had another conversation about stealing ducks at 4:00 AM at the very same gas station that you may recall from the infamous post Insomnia and Ducks.

Let me explain.

I have been under a fair bit of stress over the past 5 months.  My partner, friend, mentor, and chair of the tax controversy team at my firm abruptly announced in mid-November that he had been battling a rare, aggressive form of cancer, and he was retiring.  Effective two hours before he told the rest of our team, and two and a half before he shared it with the rest of the firm.  Sadly, he passed away at the end of December. 

So, here I am, a neophyte partner now in charge of the team, the robust client base, and not the most straightforward area of the law.  (Ask me about the different types of innocent spouse relief, the super special estate tax lien, or the centralized partnership audit regime, I dare you…)

Suffice it to say, I have had a full plate…two full plates, at that…and sadly the daylight hours have not proven sufficient to meet the task of said platefuls.  And that brings us back to the damn ducks.

If you recall from our last anatine-related[1] saga, the not-so-diminutive antipode to the protagonist of the tale (your faithful author/photographer), who we dubbed “Kyle”—not because we were protecting the innocent, but because I was to flabbergasted to remember the leviathan’s real name, and giving him more than four letters seemed an awful mean trick to name the kid—saw my sweatshirt and asked the question that still haunts me to this day:

                “Is it illegal to steal ducks from the park?”

I just wanted caffeine, Kyle.  As I noted in the last post, Kyle continued: “Ducks.  From the county park.  Is it illegal to take them?  I mean, they’re just sitting right there.”  I wrote then that the sentence “They’re just sitting right there” would “be etched in my brain until I take my last breath.”  I had no clue how prescient that statement was.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

At 4:00 on the dot, the gas station computers reset themselves.  I’ve experienced this before, and it takes about five minutes for the registers to come back online.  I just had to keep my mouth shut for five minutes, but being my mother’s son, although I had the ability, I lacked the capacity to make small talk with the androgynous emo cashier, Jeremiah.  His name was Jeremiah.  I looked this time.

“You know, there used to be a Paul Bunyan-sized lad who worked here.  I think his name was Kyle.  He once posed the strangest question I have ever been asked.”

Jeremiah looked up, interest piqued.  “What was that?”

“Kyle asked if it was illegal to steal ducks from a park.”

Now, dear reader, I had expectations of dear Jeremiah’s reaction.  He could have chortled and said, “Oh that rapscallion, Kyle.”  He could have been a vegan and have been mortified.  Nope.

“That’s actually a very common topic on the internet.  Depends on the type of bird and where you take it from.”

Sonofa….

I was not so much surprised at this factoid, because there is a lot of weird stuff on the interwebs—but by the simple nonchalance that Jeremiah (a) knew this, and (b) would so casually volunteer such knowledge without a punctilio of compunction.  Punk.

Perhaps there was lead in the giant octopus tattoo on his right arm.  For humanity’s sake, I hope this is the case…or that he steals the wrong bird from the wrong park and the book is thrown at him.

Come to think of it, I have a lot of law books.  They’re heavy.  If Jeremiah or Kyle try to steal my duck, I’ll finally have further use for that gigantic civil procedure tome that is gathering dust on my bookshelf.

If you take anything away from this, talking to others is inadvisable unless you are ready for the consequences.  I should have been practicing social distancing.  You really can never be too careful.

[1] The term for something related to ducks is “anatine.” Derived from the Latin word “anatina,” which is a diminutive form of “anatis,” meaning “duck,” anatine pertains to ducks or is characteristic of ducks.  This term is often used in contexts such as biology, ornithology, and descriptive zoology to classify and describe features, behaviors, or habitats that are specific to ducks or duck-like in nature.  Also, it happens to relate to pre-dawn gas station attendants curiosities.

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The Angry Ibis

SSA Photography (302 of 400)

(Yes, this is a beautiful, if not cantankerous crow, but the ibis is skittish and I don’t have a long telephoto anymore…)

Taking up work at home has interesting advantages, as well as obvious drawbacks.  The munchkin, a two-year-old ginger girl with a heart of gold, weeps openly when I go upstairs to the office.  As you might imagine, this rends my heart.  The minion, a seven-year-old, decries the fact that I don’t take him fishing every seven minutes whilst I am home.  As you might imagine, this gets old.  Nevertheless, I love them both, and having the opportunity to see them more often has been a blessing.

My sleep schedule has not changed too radically, as I still wake up in the wee hours of the morning to write.  What has changed, is my company.  Instead of the irritable Vietnamese cleaning lady and the security guard that we all refer to as “Lurch” or the “Parking Nazi,” I have been visited daily by a beautiful, but very skittish, brown ibis that perches in the birch tree outside the office window come about 3:00.  He is either terribly lonely, horny, angry as hell, or schizophrenic.  I haven’t quite figured out which it is.  I have a sneaking suspicion that he is not lonely—though he might just be a racist—because he chased a white ibis away when I was walking Deacon yesterday.

His calls are monotone and shrill.  They sound like, as I imagine, a professional mourner may have sounded in an ancient Roman funeral.  “Aye-e, Aye-e, Aye-e.”  How this hasn’t woken up the minion who is highly sound-sensitive is beyond me.  He let me and the munchkin (duly muzzled for the endeavor) get a bit closer to him the other day while he was on the bank of the lake, and I think that he is more comfortable on dry land than he is perched in a tree.  I never took an ibis, a wading bird, as a tree-mourner, but there you have it.

I think it’s a fairly perfect metaphor, however, for where I am right now.  I am in a whole new roost in the converted “office” upstairs, which doubles as a guest bedroom, a TV room, a hermitage, and an observatory.  Like the ibis, I find myself disgruntled in the morning, and I often wonder whether he has been displaced by the virus, too.  Similarly, like the ibis, I find myself isolated, but not necessarily by anyone’s fault but my own.  I am enjoying this social distancing so far, but even I, an inveterate introvert, miss my people.  Perhaps the ibis is calling to a friend at the other end of the lake, and the two are masters in social distancing.  Lord knows I have the time to figure this out from my perch in the observatory.

 

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Two Crows on Spanish Beach

CaliSet3-2

The sky was sepia and thick from the smoke from the highlands where fires raged, uncontrolled and hungry like it had so many times before.  Fire trucks lined the Pacific Coast Highway, which was closed south of Rocky Point.  Any hope of going to Big Sur and seeing the redwoods was dashed, and the new hope was that the fire was stopped before it reached them.

I walked on Spanish Beach with Kemper and Anna, among the seaweed and the granite outcroppings, where Kemper stacked stones in little cairns as if to say “I’ve been here, and I was industrious.”  He was first to spot the two crows babbling amongst themselves, perhaps about the fires, and perhaps about the little visitor approaching without caution.  They hopped from place to place, not quite flying though propelled by their charcoal wings, themselves dappled with ash.  They settled on a low stone, glancing at us with queerly knowing eyes, whose whole blackness belied the sentience behind them.

I told Kemper to slow, to admire the birds before he scared them to flight.  He stopped, perhaps as intrigued as they were.  I told him that they had been known to drop nuts on the street so that passing cars could crush them, only to swoop down and pick up the fresh meats from the cracked shells.

In his small universe, these two were the birds that I spoke of.  Not those crows in Japan that had learned this behavior.  But I understood then, that this beach, these rocks, these crows—these were his universe.  These crows were the only oddities that his four-year-old imagination could process at the time.  The sky was smoky in and of itself, like a chthonic deity.  There need be no fires, only smoke.  There need be no other crows, only these.

As we walked away, careful to keep a wide radius from the crows, they continued to look at us, their heads panning ever so slightly as we passed.  The crows will still be there, as they are in this photograph and in his mind, fixed in eternity, a memory of a distant beach on a foreign coast, until he sees the next pair of crows flitting about the shortleaf pines in his backyard, wondering how they made the journey but ever grateful that they made it for him.

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Anna’s Hummingbird

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This photograph of a female Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte Anna) feeding on alium flowers was taken in my in-laws’ garden in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.  She visited the flowers nearly every day we were there, but she always visited alone.  Her mate would have had beautiful pink plumage around his neck.  I have always been fascinated by the drab colors of female birds (such as cardinals and tanagers) in contrast to the fantastically colored feathers of the males.  My grandfather was an avid bird-watcher, and he was the first to teach me to distinguish between the sexes of birds.   My mom carried on his love for watching and identifying birds, which she passed on to me.  I have already begun teaching Kemper the species of birds that live in our yard.  He was especially fond of the “tipmouse” that took up residence in our garage over the summer.

Click here for a larger version.

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Pod

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I took the photograph of this pod of pelicans off of Point Lobos, in Carmel, California.  This is only the front of a much longer line of pelicans that was flying down the coast, and I thought the panorama captured them nicely against the bay and the creeping marine layer.  I love how they are all in different stages of flight, some coasting and some flapping frenetically.

Click here for a larger version (and a color version).

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Passerine

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“Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque,
et quantum est hominum venustiorum:
passer mortuus est meae puellae-
passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quem plus illa oculis suis amabat.”

Mourn, O Venuses and Cupids,
and whatever there is of pleasing me:
the sparrow of my girl is dead –
the sparrow, the delight of my girl,
whom she loved more than her own eyes.

Catullus, Carmen 3

As evidenced by this brief passage from the funeral dirge of the first century (BC) Roman poet Catullus, the sparrow has been a subject of art and admiration (even tongue-in-cheek adoration) for thousands of years.  I found this golden crowned sparrow perched in the chaparral along the path towards Whaler’s Cove in Point Lobos State Nature Reserve, Carmel, California.  I thought it was a lovely photograph of a beautifully marked bird, but upon closer inspection of the photograph as I was processing the photos at the end of the day, I noticed the rather doleful look on the sparrow.  For an animal that flits about, seemingly without care, this look struck me as rather queer.  Perhaps, like Catullus, I am importing more meaning to the life of a sparrow than reason would suggest appropriate.  Still, this remains my favorite photograph of the many sparrows I have photographed over the course of the last fifteen years or so.

Click here for a larger version (and a black and white version).

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Aesacus

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This panorama was taken near Carmel Point, the southernmost point of the coastline in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.  The title, Aesacus, alludes to the myth memorialized in Chapter 11 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  The youth Aesacus fell in love with Hesperia.  As he pursued her, she was bitten by a snake and died.  Aesacus gives a brief soliloquy lamenting her death, which he says was caused by him and the snake equally.  The sentence after his speech contains one of my favorite images in Augustan-era poetry: “Dixit et e scopulo, quem rauca subederat unda, se dedit in pontum.”  (“So he spoke, and from the cliff, which the rough waves had eaten away below, he gave himself to the sea.”)  As Aesacus fell, the ocean goddess Tethys took pity on him and changed him into a diving bird.  Watching the five diving birds in the photograph flying between rocks (eaten away by the sea) made me think at once of the Aesacus myth, which gave the scene such a mournful subtext.

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Twa Corbies

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This photograph was taken on Spanish Beach, just off of Seventeen Mile Drive in Monterey, California during the Sobersanes wild fire.  The sky was sepia, and the general mood was foreboding.  When I saw these two crows (twa corbies) seemingly conspiring with one another, my mind turned back to the macabre Middle English folk song, “The Twa Corbies.”

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Marine Layers

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This photograph was taken just after dawn in Point Lobos State Natural Reserve in Carmel, California.  The stratification in the photo is a result of the low “marine layer” rolling in over the bay, which layer forms in the summer months as the warmer air above the Pacific is cooled by the ocean waters.  The resulting gradient was interesting in full color, but I felt that the monochromatic layers gave the photograph a more distinct presence, which is set off nicely by the black and white gull.

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