Jay, the Carbonated Dove

Had been wondering.  As documented, I’d been leaving meal worms out on the concrete slab down below, above the sceptic.  No one touched them all day, they are never there in the morning.  I was up early for a call as usual and all the lights were out.  In the back yard the moon lit the yard and there was a substantive shadow, foraging around down there.  It might have been a porcupine or a ground hog, but once I had the binoculars on it was plain to see from his big, striped tail that it was a raccoon.  Seeing as how they are unreserved about rummaging through garbage, one assumes that this fella didn’t pass up my regular meal worm offering.

There is a water line that runs out the house and into the garden. But the hose fixture that it should connect to has cut clean through.  We diddled around for a while, my wife, and I and managed to connect the garden hose on one end to the source, and the other end to the line that runs out to the garage.  A big blue handle suggested that it simply needed to be pulled and the water would flow.  But it didn’t.  Downstairs the source of that water line was traceable back to a row of handles.  All the lines but this one had a knob to turn.  For now, we’re befuddled.

Stuck home, waiting out the virus, I got tired of nagging my little one to read, to write, to practice for the SATs.  Riding my bike home, I resolved to turn the study into a competition.  I could give them both a vocab quiz.  My wife is always diligently adding to her English word hoard, so I knew she’d be willing.  But the little one?  I suggested that whoever got the higher score could dump a glass of ice water on my head, which caught her attention.  At dinner it was revealed that my daughter got a B while my wife got 100%.  Mercifully my wife wasn’t interested in dousing me. 

Everything seems to revolve around the virus, for so long now.  First, we watched it sweep across China, watched friends evacuate, colleagues hunker down.  Now it is the U.S. turn and I’d say we are likely more tuned into to this progression then most Americans because we watched what happened in Asia so closely. 

I’ve been wishing I knew more of these bird calls.  A few are easy: the abrasive blue jay, the carbonated dove.  I think I know what the cardinal sounds like at this point as they prominently occupy a branch and make it obvious when they are calling.  Most calls, however, remain a mystery.  There are a few birdcall libraries I found on-line, but the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Ornithological Lab appears to be the most serious.  Issue is, you need to know the specific bird name.  Entering “cardinal” gets you thirty different birds to choose from.  I took a guess and picked the vermillion cardinal, which seems an oxymoron.  I had to wade through dozens of other birds that begin “black capped” before I found my little back yard sparrow.   There must be an app like Shazam that lets you record them in real time and feed you back what it is.  I’ll look. (I now have three of them.)

Wednesday, 03/11/20