Category: birds

birds, humor

Dirty Look Thru Dirty Window

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
The [Menu] button (atop the vertical black bar) reveals widgets like the Search box.  Typing just the [Enter] key into the Search box is good for browsing WordPress blogs.

My seed feeder is hung just outside my living room window.  Please pretend that the white specks in my hasty snapshot are snowflakes, not crud on plexiglass that refuses to stay clean (but is springy enough to prevent serious injury when a bird tries to fly thru it).

hungry-chickadee_A-ME-De0_800x498

Hey, stupid! The feeder’s empty!

When I am slow to refill the feeder, birds rummage in the tray and sometimes find a seed among the debris that has accumulated.  Then they usually go elsewhere for a while.

Sometimes a chickadee (but never a bird of another species) has a different response.  The chickadee sits on the edge of the tray (looking into my house) and glares at me.  Corvids and parrots are not the only brainy birds.

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birds, haiku, humor

Warned by a Shadow

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
The [Menu] button (atop the vertical black bar) reveals widgets like the Search box.  Typing just the [Enter] key into the Search box is good for browsing WordPress blogs.

From some viewpoints, a shadow has a bright side.  An example is my response to

Carpe Diem Haiku Family — A New “Shadow” Challenge

hawk-shadow_800x356

Image cropped from © Ryanfaas | Dreamstime.com

Lost Lunch?
|Sunlight breaks thru clouds
|and sends hawk’s shadow downward.
|Prey darts for cover.

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birds, haiku, humor, photography, politics

Amazing Photos Out There

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
Typing just [Enter] key into the Search box makes it easy to browse WordPress blogs.  Here, the [Menu] button (atop the vertical black bar) reveals widgets like the Search box.

While I did not take the photos shown here, I did write the haiku.
coming-storm_350x466

Many amazing photos have been submitted to the Weather Channel’s It’s Amazing Out There / 2016 Photo Contest.  The contest has both expert judging and voting for the “fan favorite” by anybody with a Facebook account.  U can vote daily until 2016-08-26 and distribute those votes however U like.  Having viewed only a few of the submissions, am I competent to recommend votes to other people?  Not really, but Donald Trump has set the competence bar low enough to be cleared by a garden slug.  Being a little more competent (and a lot more honest) than Trump, I will share my enthusiasms anyway, with cropped/resized versions of 2 submissions.

While I have been voting enthusiastically for Coming Storm by CJDraper (aka Dancing Echoes on WordPress), I also want to salute the fan favorite as of the last time I looked:  Ozzie (a bald eagle) by Davedc.  The latter already has plenty of well-deserved votes, so I wrote a haiku inspired by it.

Mythornithology
|When we saw himself,
|Narcissus forgot to drink.
|Eagle had more sense.

eagle-drinking_350x266

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birds, haiku

Swamp Colors

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
The [Menu] button (atop the vertical black bar) reveals widgets like the Search box.  Typing just the [Enter] key into the Search box is good for browsing WordPress blogs.

Great blue herons are really bluish gray but are sometimes seen in colorful surroundings. As the “great” blue is the only “blue” heron anyway, I consider the word “great” to be superfluous. Blue herons where I live usually fly away before people can get at all close.

One day in June of 2010, however, was magical. The weather was warm and dry rather than the usual hot and humid. I was able to walk on a road beside a swamp w/o feeding every mosquito in the county. A blue heron foraging in a sea of water lilies was so intent on feeding itself that it ignored me. The view thru binoculars was almost as good as in a nature film, and there is something special about actually being there.

The resulting haiku is my response to Carpe Diem #922 sight (colors).

Swamp Colors
|Ignoring pink and
|yellow lilies, blue heron
|stabs and swallows fish.

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