birds

Running: by the birds

/ Ann Dominguez / 2 Comments

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Goodness, I love spring.  I love the tulip bulbs blooming and the trees budding.  Most of all, I love that the birds are back.

I had a lapse in my running.  You know: illness and darkness and vacation… it added up to a few weeks with no miles on my feet.  As I age, I lose fitness so much faster (and regain it so much more slowly), and these last few runs have been hard.  The ease I felt in my long January runs was absent.  I am slowly clawing my way back to running.  To function.

But the birds are back, and each time I see one, I am inspired to go a little further.

  • a house finch singing from the peak of my neighbor’s roof.
  •  the pair of robins flirting in a budding apple tree.
  • a flock of redwing blackbirds in the reeds and cattails.
  • a hawk, sitting completely still on a stone wall.  Over my music, I could hear a frantic, repetitive keening that I thought was from him, but it was from the terrified prairie dogs he was watching.
  •  a flicker, so pretty I tried to snap a photo, but he was long gone by the time I had untangled my phone from my pocket.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops- at all-

And sweetest – in the Gale- is heard/And sore must be the storm/That could abash the little Bird/That kept so many warm-

I’ve heard it in the chilliest land/And on the strangest Sea/Yet- never- in Extremity/It asked a crumb- of me.  –Emily Dickinson

A Few of our Neighbors

/ Ann Dominguez / 3 Comments

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This little fellow has been hopping around a lot lately.  His mama stays near but hides better, until he calls out for her, “Cheep!” and then she comes flying over.

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We try to sit very, very still so he’ll stay longer.

And there are lots of this family around:

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They, too, are waiting for the raspberries to ripen.
Can anyone identify this little lady? She’s very well hidden, nesting on last year’s robins’ nest. I think she’s a mourning dove.  She’s so much smaller than the rock pigeons, though…

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