Birds | dual personalities

February 19, 2025

“Raise a glass to the King! For He has dealt most kindly with us; raise a glass to the King!”*

by chuckofish

We are in the deep freeze–it was around 10 degrees all day yesterday. We got some snow, but nothing compared to south of us. We hunkered down.

I read some more of Signal 32 by MacKinlay Kantor–I ordered a used copy online. It is a hard-boiled police procedural from 1950, probably written to make some money, but it is, as you can imagine, better than the average from that genre. It is about two uniform cops in NYC who go about their daily business, sort of like a post-WWII Adam-12. In 1948 the Acting Commissioner of Police authorized Kantor to proceed on all police activities, accompanying the patrolmen in their work. Kantor learned the life of a policeman through first-hand experience. It is pretty grim and stark and emphasizes (like the TV show) all the bad stuff policemen have to deal with on a daily basis.

I did my homework for my bible study–Exodus 4. It is a lot of work! But it is good to have challenging work to do. My brain needs the exercise!

This is a very cool video from the John 10:10 Project about penguins:

And I really liked this “drinking hymn”* which Anne posted in memory of her friend, a Reformed Episcopal Church (Anglican) priest, who died. I’m not quite sure what my PCA brothers would make of this–Would they do this at one of their men’s retreats?

Raise a glass to the King, boys! Raise a glass to the King!

For He has dealt most kindly with us; raise a glass to the King!

One more time!

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July 26, 2024

And I stood beneath the blue sky

by chuckofish

Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer,
    who formed you from the womb:
“I am the Lord, who made all things,
    who alone stretched out the heavens,
    who spread out the earth by myself,
²⁵who frustrates the signs of liars
    and makes fools of diviners,
who turns wise men back
    and makes their knowledge foolish,
²⁶who confirms the word of his servant
    and fulfills the counsel of his messengers,
who says of Jerusalem, ‘She shall be inhabited,’
    and of the cities of Judah, ‘They shall be built,
    and I will raise up their ruins’…

(Isaiah 44:24-26)

Here’s more Isaiah to propel us into the weekend. I daresay we can all use it.

We are heading to Jefferson City today and the boy and his family are heading out to the beach on Sunday so traveling mercies to all who are on the road. We also wish the boy and daughter #3 a happy 12th anniversary on Sunday! Mazel tov!

This is a cool photo from @audubonsociety…

Pileated Woodpeckers are my faves.

And daughter #1 sent this for your weekly dose of Mr. Smith…

Quel cutie.

The summer is winding down. Soon it will be back-to-school time!

(Chris and Thomas)

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July 2, 2024

“The vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs”*

by chuckofish

We enjoyed another beautiful summer day yesterday with low humidity and a high of 81 degrees. Zut alors! Practically unheard of for our part of flyover country in July!

I ran errands and busied myself getting ready for the 4th of July. By then it will have warmed up considerably and will do doubt be raining. But c’est la vie.

I thought this video about vultures was great. They are indeed one of God’s ugliest creations, but also one of the most amazing. (There is a lesson there.) We see them frequently around here, sailing their slow majestic spirals, but I have never seen one up close (except at the zoo). Once when crossing the Missouri River we saw a tree filled with them on the riverside.

Never stoops the soaring vulture
On his quarry in the desert,
On the sick or wounded bison,
But another vulture, watching
From his high aerial look-out
Sees the downward plunge, and follows;
And a third pursues the second,
Coming from invisible ether,
First a speck, and then a vulture ,
Till the air is dark with pinions.

–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from “Hiawatha”

Sometimes vultures make for a scene of horror, such as in the movie The Four Feathers (1939). And sometimes they save the day as in the book The Searchers by Alan LeMay.

Meanwhile, Idabelle learns how to water the porch…

…and the Hibiscus is ready to pop!

Enjoy the day!

*Walt Whitman, from “A July Afternoon by the Pond”

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June 7, 2023

Let Nature be your teacher*

by chuckofish

Today, a guest post from DN!

One of the highlights of our home is a space we call the backroom—a three- or four-season Florida room (depending on the year) attached to the rear of the house. In the winter, the backroom’s windows help us feel that we’re getting enough sun. In the summer, the room is a great way to escape air conditioning and feel a little humidity on our skin. But spring is when the backroom really shines. There is so much life to see.

Although we haven’t seen any eggs, we think that they are in there. Every time the robin returns to the nest, she performs a side-to-side tush-scooch, nestling herself in.

And although the backroom has lots of books and toys, what really holds Katie’s interest is the yard beyond. She inherently wants to observe and discuss.

“To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even in the era of manhood.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

When I showed Katie the second photo, she told me that the sparrow was holding a crumb. Now where would she get the idea that birds love crumbs?

From *Each Peach Pear Plum* by Janet and Allan Ahlberg

* ”The Tables Turned” by William Wordsworth. (I couldn’t very well cite a 19^th century American author without an offsetting British Romantic.)

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May 5, 2023

Follow the yellow brick road

by chuckofish

Happy Cinco de Mayo! My, my, can you believe it is already May 5? The wee twins only have a few weeks left of school. This Sunday they “graduate” from kindergarten and receive their first Bibles at church. A big day.

Meanwhile Katie is reading her own Bible…

In other news, the kitchen-window Robin has laid another egg. Interestingly, I ran across this chapter of a book by Amy Carmichael in which she worries about a sunbird who has built a nest outside her window.

Outside my room in Dohnavur a sunbird has hung her nest from a spray of valaris. The spray is as light as a spray of honeysuckle and grows in much the same careless way. The nest is attached to the spray by a few threads of cobweb, but so delicately that the touch of a child would detach it; a cupful of water thrown at it would sweep it down. It is a mere nothing of a nest. But it took a week of patient mothercraft to make it. It is roofed, it has a porch, and set deep within is a bed of silky down.

Exactly where no rain could hurt it, that nest hung; and the little mother sat calmly through those floods, her dainty head resting on the threshold of the porch which she had made on the south side – the sheltered side. If a drop of water fell on her long, curved beak, she sucked it up as though it had been honey. And always, somehow, she was fed.

I think to more than one of us the Father spoke then. There is something very precious about a little bird and her nest, but “Ye are of more value than many sparrows” – than many sunbirds.

Have you watched Bluey? Me neither–maybe I should check it out.

The OM is celebrating his high school 50th reunion this weekend. Can you imagine? Time flies. I hope he enjoys himself, but count me out. I’ll wait til next year.
Is my heritage to me like a hyena’s lair? Are the birds of prey against her all around? Go, assemble all the wild beasts; bring them to devour. (Jeremiah 12:9)

And the wee bud (finally) lost a tooth!

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December 14, 2021

Daily walking close to Thee

by chuckofish

Well, how are you doing nine days before Christmas? Organized and ready to go?

My bedroom is a disaster area, but I’m “getting there” and that’s the best I can do. But getting there is half the fun!

This is an interesting article by a birdwatcher. I know some birdwatchers and I doubt if they would agree with it. “Brother and sisters, God has placed birds in your life…for you to enjoy, to praise God for, to care for and to teach you to be confident and remember that God will look after you.” I like to watch birds because they remind me how obvious it is that God did indeed create the heavens and the earth and that on the fifth day He “let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky…every winged bird according to its kind.” I saw a Bald Eagle when we were driving in mid-MO a few weekends ago and that was very exciting, but seeing a Flicker in the backyard is just as exciting to me! Quel oiseau!

But wait, birds aren’t real, right? Not surprisingly, the New York Times did a front page story on these idiots, but I can’t link to it because I don’t have a subscription. Tant pis.

On a higher plain, here’s a classic Christmas episode of the The Andy Griffith Show from 1962 to put you in a yuletide frame of mind.

And here’s a great old hymn. I remember it from Cool Hand Luke (1967). Harry Dean Stanton sang it.

Through this world of toil and snares,
If I falter, Lord, who cares?
Who with me my burden shares?
None but thee, dear Lord, none but thee.

Hang in there! Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem. (Isaiah 52: 1)

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November 3, 2020

“What is life but a series of inspired follies?”*

by chuckofish

Recently I watched the movie My Foolish Heart (1949) which, as you know, is the only film adaptation of a fictional work written by J.D. Salinger. It was loosely adapted from his short story, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” and Salinger was so disappointed with the changes made to his original story, that he never again allowed any of his work to be adapted for film.

Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward–all wrong

It isn’t a terrible movie (especially if you don’t know the Salinger connection.) The screenplay is, after all, by Julius and Philip Epstein, who wrote Casablanca (1942). But they took Salinger’s poignant little story and turned it into a four-star tearjerker, giving it the full-blown Hollywood treatment. He must have been really embarrassed, I mean really embarrassed. I re-read the story and I suggest you do the same.

This is an interesting article about a dead Presbyterian who still has a lot to say to us.

And this article by an Episcopalian makes some good points.

And I like this poem by Richard Wilbur:

A Barred Owl

The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

Who cooks for you?

*George Bernard Shaw (He continued, “The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.””)

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January 20, 2014

“May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks”*

by chuckofish

Happy MLK Day! A three-day weekend is most welcome, n’est-ce pas?

I am enjoying my Monday at home. Hope you are as well.

Yesterday after church I convinced my old man to drive to West Alton to the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary, located at the confluence of the Missouri, Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. It is primetime for watching Bald Eagles and Trumpeter Swans.

Here is a cool video about the awesome Mississippi Flyway:

http://riverlands.audubon.org/videos/spectacle-birds

It was very crowded at the Audubon Center (which is lovely), so we didn’t stay too long, but headed north up the Great River Road.

We saw a lot of eagles. (You know how I feel about raptors.) And eagles are the coolest, right?

“…and there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”

(H. Melville)

Someone else’s cool picture of a Bald Eagle on the Mississippi Flyway

I did not take any good pictures with my iPhone, although I tried (see below).

But they were there. The river was filled with chunks of ice.

We drove all the way up through Elsah and Grafton to Pere Marquette State Park and stopped for lunch at the historic Lodge,

but the wait would have been too long, so we headed back down the road and home to terra cognita and our local Schneithorst’s Bavarian Koffee Haus. It was not crowded.

On my own “Road to Oscar” travels, I watched the movie Nebraska this weekend.

It is a “comedy-drama” starring Bruce Dern and Will Forte and is directed by Alexander Payne. It was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where Bruce Dern won the Best Actor Award. It has also been nominated for 6 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, and Best Original Screenplay. My guess is it won’t win anything except maybe the screenplay award. We’ll see.

I can’t say I was impressed. It is one of those movies where nothing much happens and is, therefore, “arty”. Plus, it is in black and white, and that makes it even arty-er. It is also about people who live in flyover country, so they are all kind of stupid, vulgar and boring. (I live in flyover country and I do not know anyone like the people in this movie; they are what people who live on the East/West coasts think people in flyover country are like.) The only person who is at all nice is the son played by Will Forte. I kept waiting for something to happen, for the Bruce Dern character to finally have a say, but he never comes out of his dementia-fog. Why the French thought him worthy of the Best Actor award, I’ll never know.

It held my interest–mostly because I was waiting for a pay-off (none came)–and I have to say, my old man sat through the whole thing without a break. That is saying something. However, he didn’t like it either.

I also watched, per my recommendation on Friday, Buffy’s season 4 birthday episode with Giles as a fyoral demon.