Glorious

So, we got together Sunday for one of our rare meetings of Mithlond, the former Seattle area fantasy book discussion group. The weather being nice, we sat outside and enjoyed seeing what they'd done with their back yard and also got a quick tour of the Tiny House they'd built there ---the first time I'd seen one of these. Don't know how they do it, but they managed to make it look bigger on the inside.

Amid our sipping tea while discussing books and films and plays and a myriad of other things, we got into  a desultory discussion of various birds that came up to their yard, including whether the woodpecker they said they occasionally see was a flicker or a pileated woodpecker. Not long after I made a good case that it was probably a flicker, a pileated woodpecker flew in, circled the yard, and flew off again. 

Wow.

This marks the first tine I've ever seen a real, live pileated woodpecker.* I've seen a dead one in a parking lot (alas), and I've looked the wrong direction when people I'm with have seen one, including one time back in my Scouting days, when I used to go out on pre-dawn birding with Mr. Stirling Lacy and Dr. Charles Rogers, both of whom I knew from the church.  So I can tell a scissor-tailed flycatcher from a shrike, but birdwatching makes no promises. You just put yourself at a likely spot at a likely time and hope for the best.

Which is why most of my birdwatching these days is v. low-key: watching the hummingbird wars off the balcony, admiring the chickadees and goldfinches and juncos and sometimes a pair of flickers,** keeping an eye out for everything from red wing blackbirds to great blue herons and once in a long while a bald eagle (a pair nests just a mile or so from our townhouse).  And of course I used to feed the crows when I went out but I've scaled back on that a lot in recent years.

Might be a good time to dig out that copy of THE GRAIL BIRD which I bought several years ago but have never read.

--John R.

*It looks just like an ivory-billed woodpecker, except for the color of its bill and not being extinct.

**They've been coming up for as long as we've lived here, so it must be a long line of descendents.