All posts in category birds

blue moon

Last night there was a blue moon. I digiscoped some photos of it from inside the house, none of which I was terribly happy with, but here is one below. I was trying to capture the moon’s orange color, but needed the flash to do so and didn’t take the time to set it up properly so the scope’s lens would not reflect. The most orange ones came out too blurry. This was also taken through a window, so yeah. Oh well. It’s the moon.

Today I rescued a turtle from almost certain death. That felt good. I had never picked up a turtle before. I hope to pick up more before my time comes. I love turtles. Where’s my shell.

It’s September 1st and the humidity’s raging like someone’s got the summer clamped in a leg trap. If I find out who it is I’m gonna open a can of whup-ass on ’em. Or something. SOMETHING. Yes, indeed. I’ll remember this post come winter. Yes, I will.

Oh, and some hummingbirds finally showed up in the yard. They were out there this morning feeding on the trumpet vine blossoms. Of course I immediately put the feeder back out. Hopefully they’ll stick around for a while.

8 Comments

by sean on September 2, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in birds, blue moon, hummingbirds, summer, turtles

Posted by sean on September 2, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/09/02/blue-moon/

anagrams = an arm gas

There is a Grand Prix auto race going on in front of my work today. Cars that reach speeds of 175 mph are driving on the city streets. That’s a good idea isn’t it, isn’t it. They sound like giant alien mosquitoes, whining at high pitch. Where is my giant fly swatter. Oversized things are always funny. You should know this. Any object that is much bigger than its normal size is innately humorous. This is some sort of natural law, I believe. I’ve seen forks that are like five feet long and I immediately fell on the floor seized by paroxysms of laughter. There is no denying this. Think about those giant foam cowboy hats. They are not funny because they’re foam; they’re funny because they’re huge. Let’s just agree to agree on this and I won’t say anything more about it.

As you’re pondering very large things that are usually smaller, here are a few anagrams:

EVERYTHING IS IN EVERYTHING = THE TINY GREEN IVY HIVE GRINS

AMERICAN HANDBOOK = A MOAN CHOKED BRAIN

ELF GENDER = FERN LEDGE

Today is Thursday and I just ate some pretzel sticks. This means it is the last day of work for me. Hooray. I feel the shackles loosen. Soon I will hulk out and roam unshackled for ~~four~~ five whole days [just made an executive decision to also take Tuesday off]. I thought about taking today off, too, so I could go birding because it’s been awhile since I’ve visited my bird friends. But I decided to come in and make anagrams instead. Plus the creeper carpet is creeping my way and I have a few last minute preparations to make. I am sure I will see my bird friends this weekend instead. Or Tuesday.

This afternoon I plan to drink yerba mate again and do some things. After that who knows. I might write a short play. As F.K. would say, don’t touch my chains.

6 Comments

by sean on August 30, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in anagrams, birding, birds, car race, everything is in everything, giant things, i am in chains don't touch my chains, mosquitoes, other things, yerba mate

Posted by sean on August 30, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/08/30/anagrams-an-arm-gas/

possible kalopsic casualty

Last night I swam in a sea of almost-sleep, drifting in and out of almost-lucid dreams, all of which evaporated upon waking. It was the fan, I think. The fan instead of the A/C. What was I thinking. The Siren song of dropping humidity dripped its sugar-sweet serum into my ear holes. Damn you Weather Sirens. It is Wednesday now. My bird-of-the-day calendar displays a sleek Green Kingfisher. I replaced the bulb above my office plant. We are getting new green carpet; it smells bad and looks like it was torn out of some swinger’s 1960s basement rec room. I cringe at the thought of it creeping in all molester-like into my personal office space. My feet will never be the same. Violation! Violation. I am listening to the liferaft again. So help me, I cannot help myself. Do you know what I mean. Do you. Do you really know. I attended a meeting this morning. I was 9 minutes late on account of I was waiting for the coffee to stop brewing. Also my coworker and I were busy trash-talking the last 4 years of our professional lives. I am back to drinking too much coffee again. But I drink the special tea after lunch to try and repair the damage. It appears to work, but maybe not since there was the almost-sleep and that is a heavy consideration. I am eating my lunch now and not smoking a cigar. But I bet that guy is. I’ll bet he is. The liferaft has segued into the bedside table. That is where I keep the 5 books I am currently reading, most of them Kafka-related. But there is Jung, too. And Tessimond. All of my dear friends stacked in a pile within easy reach. With my Moleskine. Sigh. Last night while out walking Farley we saw a cat. It was not a metaphorical cat that might or might not be in a box, dead or alive. It was a real cat and Farley was interested. He stared under the car long after the cat had run back across the street. I want a cat so bad. Nearby to where I live a train went off the tracks in the dead of night. Two college girls were up on the bridge tweeting photos and they were buried under a mountain of coal. They died. I’d like to think this exposes the ills of social media, but I’m not sure. I feel bad about this. That’s why I listen to the liferaft so much. It makes the sounds that I feel inside most of the time. I am perhaps a blurred model of myself. I walk outside and brush my hand against the lavender blooms and surreptitiously sniff. Hey, it’s that guy who is always sniffing his hand. Yes, that is me. I enjoy touching things in nature that look soft. I find them irresistible. I find much of what is around me irresistible. The rest of it can fall off the planet for all I care. The Internet ruined my concentration. I enjoy chasing rabbits of information down their hidey holes. That is really what I do. Often. Sometimes I pass on what I find to others. Sandy Berman taught me that. He is a good man. We used to write letters back and forth. I was an over-excited new library school student. Now I just search for stuff on the Web. My idealism is easily trod upon into a gross paste that I plan to smear on the molester carpet when it arrives leering and panting outside my office door. What you don’t know is that I was just outside touching the lavender. Literally. Between that one sentence and the next. What do you think about that. My hand smells so fucking good right now. Outside there was a truck with bins on the side dispensing free energy bars. The orbs and their blobs were shoving their fleshy flaccid fingers in those bins so fast. But they are healthy nutrition bars. Ha! That is a fucking good trick! I feel so alive today. It made me walk fast. Surf the mania. I am 100% alive and 100% dead ALL THE TIME. I am petting the cat and its back is arched. I’m an out-of-the-box solution, suckers.

4 Comments

by sean on August 22, 2012 • Permalink

Posted by sean on August 22, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/08/22/possible-kalopsic-casualty/

why does this channel play such a peculiar strain of white noise

Your shoulders bend forward to keep out the world. I see it. What is the point. Why do we insist on throwing ourselves out into the fray. Retreat! Climb onto this liferaft I have constructed from a few termite-riddled planks bound together with the discarded hairs from your head. It’s all different but the same. Longing and self-denial: our life’s work, the unrequitable nectar from which we feed, desperate fools that we are. I can’t bear to look.

Today I took Farley to Spiderweb City. I heard a Black-billed Cuckoo, a bird I identify with. Common but secretive? Rumored to predict rain? Maybe not. I came home, ran around inside the house with my paint bucket, sweating, the futility of it all welling up inside, allegro. Mainlining futility, hoping someday for the pure uncut junk that blows your mind.

Later: party time. An invitation not refused. Perhaps the strangest party I have yet attended in a lifetime of suffering strange parties. Now here I sit, a party of one. Freebasing dictionaries and dreaming of foreign scents. The window is open to let in the rare cool night air. The city crickets patch together their ragged symphony. I am restless with the other music, but not drowning out the crickets. The stage is set for insomnia. Cue white noise…aaand, ACTION.

Observer versus participant in the steel cage match of life. Who wins. I wish I knew. Not that it would matter. I can’t change now. I feel like a bad character actor playing myself when I go out in public. The superficial bumbler. Kafka talks about being alone and how it restores himself to himself. How he comes alive when alone. The noise in his head quiets. He says, “Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves […] and is ready to release what lies deeper.” When two people are together in aloneness it is a curious thing. In some ways it is liberating. I think it may be the best we can hope for, but I still can’t see how it ends.

So we are afloat on this rotten raft held together by your hair. And I reach to pull your shoulders back but they no longer move. Like my spine they are stuck out of place. It’s dark now and the sea grows rough. I know the morning will come, but what does that even mean. At what point did the day really end. Some weeks stretch like taffy. Others make Friday the pin on this grenade and you’re stretching your long thin arm to it all week but it’s always out of reach until all of a sudden you’re yanking the pin out and it all blows up in your face. Or it’s a dud. Either way you lose another seven days. The box of grenades is not bottomless.

The rain is falling now, again. Like the cuckoo sang it would. Rain crow, rain crow, sing us a shower. This bird is killed by pesticides; this bird collides with TV towers, with tall buildings that house banks and corporate overlords. Let us all share the blame for killing a bird that sings when it is about to rain. For there are few sounds so soothing as gently falling rain.

3 Comments

by sean on August 18, 2012 • Permalink

Posted by sean on August 18, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/08/18/why-does-this-channel-play-such-a-peculiar-strain-of-white-noise/

three days in the wilderness

The illness came on like a vicious badger. Fever and chills, weariness deep in my bones. It wiped out the remainder of Sunday like a squeegee pulled across wet glass. When I arose Monday morning the fever was gone and so off to work I rode. On the way I encountered a rain squall and took cover for some time under a tree. About an hour after I finally reached the office, the chills returned with wicked vengeance. What strange ailment this was, with its unusual suite of symptoms. Shaking uncontrollably at my desk, I tapped out an SOS. As I waited for my rescuer to arrive, I suddenly recalled the tick bites I’d received while out birding a week and a half before. One of the ticks had eluded my attention for what may have been longer than the “safe” period for transmission. That’s right, Lyme disease. Cursory web searching revealed a match for my symptoms. Not typically one for alarmist self-diagnosis, I wanted to believe it was just coincidence, but the facts could not be ignored. At the clinic, I shared what information I had with the health professionals. They, too, could not look past the facts, although the blood work they performed pointed to a viral, not a bacterial infection. That was encouraging. To be safe, the doctor ordered a Lyme titer and antibiotic treatment to address the possibility of a non-coincidence. I went home and lived through two days of feeling sicker than I have in a long time. And then yesterday the scourge left as suddenly as it had arrived, like a dark mantle yanked from my body. I felt reborn. The test results have yet to come back. However, the Lyme titer typically doesn’t show positive until at least four weeks after a tick bite, and my bite occurred much more recently. So I may never know if I had the disease. I may never know the true cost I paid to finally find that bobolink.

10 Comments

by sean on June 21, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in bobolink, lyme disease, sickness, ticks

Posted by sean on June 21, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/21/three-days-in-the-wilderness/

revoke my car privileges and drop me in a field somewhere, please

Rarely do I feel compelled to deconstruct my entire day in the space of a blog post, but today was um…special, shall we say? It started out normal enough. Armed with an unexpected day off, I crossed county lines with field glasses in hand to search for field birds. I had good intel on locations for breeding birds, and made haste for them. With windows rolled down, I heard the telltale robotic jingle-jangle of a Bobolink and navigated over to the shoulder. Out of the car in a flash, I first thought I’d been fooled by a nearby mockingbird attempting to hog the spotlight as usual, but then the bobolink himself flew overhead, tinkling and jingling to his heart’s content. He flew across the road and landed in a field, affording me adequate looks to get the day started off on the best foot. Nemesis bird comes home to roost! I moved on. I drove the country roads for about an hour and a half and found the birds to be generally cooperative. I saw and heard all my target birds for this trip. Meadowlarks were plentiful and I got a couple of stellar looks at them. Horned Larks were not as plentiful but I did spot a couple from a distance, and heard them elsewhere. I found a singing male Dickcissel perched on the exact section of power line where I found one last year…could it have been the same bird? In addition to these birds, I was also treated to great looks at several American Kestrels.

As I began to wind down my time, I returned once again to the site of the initial bobolink sighting to see if I could cop another look. As I navigated the car onto the opposite shoulder this time, the right front end suddenly sunk into a hidden ditch. When I got out of the car, I saw that the back left wheel was about 3 feet off the ground! As I assessed the seriousness of the situation, a man in a box truck drove up and offered assistance. We tried moving the car with him sitting in the hatch for balance (he was sorta stocky), but that didn’t work so he offered to seek out a farmer down the road with a chain, or failing that to call the sheriff’s office. While waiting around, I watched a bobolink groom himself while perched on a power line. Unfortunately my concern about the car impeded my joy at witnessing this scene. About 20 minutes later I was about to give up on Box Truck Man and call a tow truck when simultaneously the sheriff showed up and two country dudes in a big pick-up passed by and offered to pull me out. Within minutes they’d hooked a chain to the frame and pulled the car out. Country folks rule! I thanked them all profusely and decided to head back to the city after so much excitement.

I needed to pick Em El up and shuttle her downtown for a meeting but I had some extra time so I stopped to check on the birds at another favorite location. There I found expected Prairie Warbler and Hooded Warbler, although couldn’t get a visual on the latter. Many singing Field Sparrows, a perched Turkey Vulture (usually they’re circling endlessly overhead at this spot), a singing White-eyed Vireo, and other usual suspects rounded out the mix.

Once downtown I killed more time (die, time, die!) by finishing Darkness Visible and continuing with Paris Spleen, drinking espresso, and getting yelled at by a probably schizophrenic man. Somehow I think Baudelaire would’ve appreciated the scene. Unbeknownst to me, while all of this fun was taking place Em El’s car was being towed because I failed to read the red highlighted part of the parking meter that said No Parking Between 4-6 PM Mon-Fri. Yes, this is common knowledge to those who frequently drive and park in the city. However, I’m like a deer in the headlights when I get downtown behind the wheel of a car (really bad simile in this context, I know). I don’t know the rules, man! I’m a cyclist, for god’s sake. I haven’t owned a car since 1997 or something (if you’re curious, it was a Plymouth Valiant that sat in my driveway for a few years after I used it to move to Virginia [it looked like this, except crappier because it only cost $400]). Anyway, I guess the cycling gods were raining down holy fire and brimstone on me today for driving too much lately. Maybe I deserved it, but damn, those cycling gods are harsh. Of course, no thanks to The City of Baltimore, either, always taking and never giving!

As we waited in line to pay the obscene $272 required to get the car back, I attempted to lighten the mood by telling Em El that at least we can chalk this up as another quintessential Baltimore experience (along with other special things, such as becoming the victim of a crime and receiving wildly inaccurate water bills). After all, you haven’t really lived in Baltimore until you’ve waited 45 minutes in the tiny concrete bunker under the interstate overpass with all the other suckers preyed upon that day by the blood-sucking savages commonly known as tow-truck drivers.

As if all this wasn’t enough, immediately after Farley ate his dinner tonight he barfed it all up in various places around the house along with all the water he’d drank in the previous 30 minutes. By that time, I was about ready to hurl myself off the deck in search of sweet unconsciouness.

To sum up, my joy tonight is all tangled with misery and weariness.

3 Comments

by sean on June 7, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in birding, birds, bobolink, books, car culture, city life, dickcissel, eastern meadowlark, existence, farley, horned lark, life, rants, reading, warblers

Posted by sean on June 7, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/07/revoke-my-car-privileges-and-drop-me-in-a-field-somewhere-please/

spotlight on bobolinks!

Male Bobolink in breeding plumage, Lake Woodruff National Wildlife Refuge, Volusia County, Florida.

Image Courtesy of Andrea Westmoreland, licensed under Creative Commons

Somewhere in a field just north and west of here a bobolink sings. If I quiet my mind enough I can almost hear it, even though I’ve so far only heard recordings. Sometimes called rice bird, butter bird, skunk blackbird, or meadow-wink, the male bobolink sings a jubilant song that has frequently been likened to the robotic voice of R2D2 in the Star Wars films. Unique in many ways, the bobolink is one of only a few species that goes through a complete molt of its feathers twice each year. The male bobolink in its breeding plumage is a most striking bird! Yet through molting for the winter it comes to resemble the much drabber female.

Twice each year, bobolinks undertake one of the longest migrations of any songbird. They winter in central South America and spend their breeding season in the northern United States and parts of southern Canada. Originally a prairie-dwelling species of the Midwestern U.S., bobolinks adapted to breeding on agricultural land and were thus able to expand their summer range. Once killed by the thousands by rice farmers in the southeast U.S., these birds are now considered to be beneficial to American farmers due to their primarily insect-based diet during the breeding season. However, loss of farmland and changes in agricultural practices over the years have led to a steep decline in bobolink nesting habitat. Meanwhile, on their wintering grounds, a shift toward rice production has made the bobolink an enemy of South American farmers. Regrettably they are not protected there by law as they have been in the United States since the Migratory Bird Act of 1918. In the past bobolinks were also served as food in restaurants, and continue to be a delicacy in Jamaica, where they earned their “butter bird” nickname, a reference to the heavy fat content of the birds when they arrive there on stopovers during their long migration.

The bobolink has long been a nemesis bird of mine, along with a few other field-dwelling species. As one who rarely travels far to watch birds, I am restricted to what habitat is nearby. Unfortunately, appropriate field habitat is not plentiful in my usual birding grounds. Searching for field birds also typically involves a lot of driving around and pulling off on narrow road shoulders in an effort to catch glimpses of species that seem to thrive on playing hide-and-seek in the shelter of their grassy living quarters. This is not my preferred method of birding. That said, there have been recent reports of bobolinks northwest of here, and I may set out this weekend once again to find this elusive and intriguing bird.

1 Comment

by sean on May 31, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in birding, bobolink, migration, nature

Posted by sean on May 31, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/05/31/spotlight-on-bobolinks/

wetlands

The evening sun dips below the reeds at Fort McHenry’s mitigated wetlands. Volunteer naturalists lead bird walks here during migration. I usually try to attend a few each year, especially since the wetlands are normally closed to the public. It’s such a unique ecosystem in this otherwise paved-over urban landscape. The osprey nesting platform was not in use; the ospreys seem to prefer the tops of light poles, power line towers, and ship cranes. There were plenty of tree swallows nesting in the swallow boxes, though. A few of their heads were poking out of the holes. We didn’t see anything unusual on our walk, but it was still a nice way to end the day.

sf trip: day two

Good Morning, San Francisco Bay Bridge!

Oh look, here comes a ferry.

It’s coming from the Ferry Building!

Inside the Ferry Building are vendors such as Pepples Donuts and Blue Bottle Coffee. Happiness is a vegan donut and a cup of drip coffee!

While enjoying my coffee and donut, I came across the following tableau.

[Please excuse this egregious example of anthropomorphism]

Fred the Western Gull: Hmm…what do we have here? Why I do believe it’s a tasty crab!

Bob the Western Gull: Hey Fred, whatcha got there, buddy?

Fred: Why, nothing, Bob. I have nothing at all.

Bob: Are ya sure there, Fred? ‘Cause it sure looks like ya got something in yer gob there, pal.

Fred: I have nothing, my good man. Now leave me be!

Bob: C’mon, Fred, just let me nibble a bit on that there crab. Dontcha ‘member me sharing my sea bass with ya last week?

Fred: Oh, very well then. But just this once.

Bob: Thanks, Fred. Yer a real stand-up guy.

Obligatory Western Grebe photo, just to prove I saw one. They kept diving underwater just as I focused in. Taken with my point-and-shoot through binoculars, which is why it’s blurry.

Coit Tower, as seen from the waterfront. We were so close to it the day before and didn’t even realize it. Still a bit annoyed about that. I would’ve walked back up there if I’d had the time.

A couple of shots from Chinatown. It’s the largest one in the Western Hemisphere!

In late afternoon we took a tour of the Mechanics’ Institute Library with the other conference participants. This is a private membership-based library, and the librarian wouldn’t let us take photos inside the library, so as to “protect the privacy of our patrons.” Instead I took a shot of this spiral staircase in the building. After I took the photo I walked down the staircase and kept feeling like I was going to fall on my face. Vertigo!

Next time: Goodbyes!

1 Comment

by sean on May 8, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in birds, chinatown, city life, coffee, donuts, libraries, san francisco, veganism, western grebe, western gull

Posted by sean on May 8, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/05/08/sf-trip-day-two/

catbird chatter

I returned early this morning from a work-related trip to San Francisco (photo post to follow). While I was gone, the catbirds skulked back into the neighborhood and resumed transmission of their esoteric messages from the protection of the now fully leafed out trees and shrubbery. I am happy to hear their secretive broadcasts once again. While out walking Farley, I also heard a House Wren singing on the next street over and a Yellow Warbler singing a little farther afield. Word on the street is that I missed a couple of stellar days of migrant fallouts in this area while I was gone. So I’m a little disappointed about that, although I did manage to pick up a few Western North American species on my trip that were lifers. On multiple occasions, I also saw and heard some of the Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, which was really cool as I’d watched the documentary about them not too long ago.

For my trip reading, I took along Anne Tyler’s Celestial Navigation. I like most of her older books and Em El particularly recommended this one. It did not disappoint! I finished up the last few pages over lunch today and was struck by this passage below. It’s certainly not cheery reading, but much of what I read and enjoy is not. For me, it’s all about the shadows.

Being good was not enough. The mistakes he reviewed were not evil deeds but errors of aimlessness, passivity, an echoing internal silence. And when he rose in the morning (having waited out the night, watching each layer of darkness lift slowly and painfully), he was desperate with the need to repair all he had done, but the only repairs he could think of were also aimless, passive, silent. He had a vague longing to undertake some metaphysical task, to make some pilgrimage. In books a pilgrimage would pass through a fairytale landscape of round green hills and nameless rivers and pathless forests. He knew of no such landscape in America. Fellow pilgrims in leather and burlap would travel alongside him only long enough to tell their stories—clear narratives with beginnings, middles, ends and moral messages, uncluttered by detail—but where would he find anyone of that description? And think of what he would have to carry in the rustic knapsack on his back. The tools of his craft; Epoxy glue in two squeeze tubes, spray varnish, electric sander, disposable paintbrushes. Wasn’t there anything in the world that was large scale any more? Wasn’t there anything to lift him out of this stillness inside? He fumbled for his clothes and picked his way downstairs. He made his breakfast toast and ate it absently, chewing each mouthful twenty times and gazing at the toaster while he tried to find just one heroic undertaking that he could aim his life toward.

5 Comments

by sean on May 3, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in anne tyler, birding, birds, gray catbird, house wren, parrots, shadow, travel, warblers, writers

Posted by sean on May 3, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/05/03/catbird-chatter/