Entry tags:

birds

Colorado
Just got back from a weeklong trip to Colorado, where, among other things, I got to see the mountain bluebird for the first time. Is that or is that not a gorgeous little thing? Completely sky blue, except for a cloudlike patch underneath. And they have a strangely sad, plantive song...not exactly something to inspire something like the "bluebird of happiness".

I also got to see some horned larks up in the mountains, just off the highest paved road in the country. It was cold and arid, winds were blowing so fiercely that we could barely stand up straight, yet here's this little bird merrily singing away as if things couldn't be better. It's a good thing the larks were singing, because I would never have noticed them otherwise. The only way to find them in the winter (when they migrate to the lowlands and are almost completely silent) is to look carefully at their typical habitat -- a barren field -- and look for small, moving "rocks".

In the mountains, I also had the fortune to see a couple of mammals I've never spotted before: the yellow-bellied marmot (a large, very friendly squirrel), and the (frikkin' adorable) American pika (also known as the "whistling hare" -- they squeak ferociously when they feel threatened).

One last interesting bird-related tidbit: I stopped at a small bookstore on our last day in the state and glanced at the backcover of a book about the American kestrel, and learned that one of the colloquial names of the kestrel is "Windhover". A short while later, I wandered to the store's reference section and pulled Richard Lederer's Literary Trivia off the shelf...and one of the first pages I turned to asked the question:

What is the "Windhover" in Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem?

And that was just too great a coincidence to ignore, so I bought the thing.

...Also off one of the main Colorado highways, there was a church...and you had to take Gay Street in order to reach it. I'm not making this up.

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I don't plug my own work that often, but I thought some people might be interested in a brief graphical summary of the earliest recorded sci-fi story (and even in this century, there STILL are major sci-fi works that feature giant spiders ["Eight Legged Freaks", f'rinstance]??)