I wasn't going to add another mini-blog entry today but Susie says I should, after I related my experience just now in the back yard, small though it was.
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| This is earlier in the year, Bird feeding a Fluffbutt |
This is a sleepy day for me; as a guy whose brain isn't well-suited to sleeping right I'm trying to bounce back yet again from another bout of far-too-little sleep days on end, which leaves me more hanging out than plotting and planning to save the world, and is probably what led me to make friends with the backyard dinosaurs in the first place.
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| here are some recent shots of Tawny |
Not a lot of new chapters; Bird did take a soft live mealworm or two to the nesting box on the side of the house, and he really likes those. Having him do anything besides swallowing as many as you'll give him, immediately, means that there's at least one young chick needing soft food. He wouldn't give his mate one of the live ones. So there may be at least one hatchling. It hasn't rained a lot and the last hatching had no survivors, and we are fresh out of live mealworms which would help us pull them through... the reconstituted ones we have are good enough for chicks a week old but not fresh-hatched. So another casualty of the pandemic, though really it just means the reproduction rate is held down to what it would otherwise be, which is probably appropriate.
Anyhow, that's not what Sue asked me to write about.
Scruffy the baby bulbul has been showing up shaking his wings and cheeping to be fed outside the kitchen at the top of the stairway... apparently my grabbing him and getting him out of the house a couple days ago is water under the bridge. He's a homely little guy who will grow up homely, his only pretty feature a red butt, but the species has personality. As Samuel Jackson's character said in Pulp Fiction, personality goes a long way.
But that's not why Susie asked me to write today.
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| Tawny the fluffbutt, shot a week or so ago |
We had Tawny hanging out in our upstairs kitchen and finally noticed him flitting about and clicking, doing his best to poop on things, so I got out some of our house special boiled chinese mealworms and he flew to my hand a number of times and got well-fed, then zoomed off to find shama adventures, and that's not what Sue felt was worth writing about either, since that's about a daily thing.
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| and another of Tawny from the same batch |
No, it was just that to stretch my legs, and Muppet's, I decided to go down the cement stairs to the lower yard, where I hadn't been in a week or so, to see the quiet bower of Avo, Mango, and Breadfruit limbs which is so nice in the trade winds when it hasn't been raining. Muppet always has access but doesn't think the yard is entertaining unless a human is in it somewhere, upon which he ignores them and cavorts about, which he was doing. But as I stood at the base of the steps I saw Bird about 25 feet off the ground in the top of the neighbor's mango tree, surveying things. Not thinking it'd come to much, I held up my right hand with my index finger out and said "hey there, Bird", thinking it'd be cool if he came down. And darned if he didn't, flew about 40 feet straight to my finger and perched there with that perfect balance of his, long tail doing all the balance work. I admitted to him that I hadn't brought any treats. He looked at me for several seconds and then fluffed up his feathers and decided to stay with me awhile, breaking into a full melodious shama song, and he kept it going for 6-7 minutes which seemed like 20. I have no idea what goes on in his little pointed head; whether it was a comradely gesture, whether it's as close to friendship as a shama can get, or whether he was just telling the world that I belonged to him when I was down there, too. Probably the latter, but that sort of thing gets close to my original goal when I told Sue I was going to try to make friends with a shama... that "I want it to fly to me out of the trees when I call it, land on my finger, and sing me beautiful songs". Darned if that doesn't happen now.
Life isn't a disney cartoon, not even close. But there are moments.
Finding them is the trick.
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