It’s possible that I have whined in these pages about the difficulty of getting good photographs of small birds.
Bigger birds are better. Not good, necessarily, but better.
And sometimes, it just makes sense to adapt the medium to the subject.
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Photo Memory of the Week
Posted: 2025 Feb 27
"I am smiling."
Blog Memory of the Week
Quote of the Week
The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning, but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. (paragraph breaks added)
Source: Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton
Music of the Week
Poetry of the Week
Never Again Would Birds' Song be The Same
- Robert FrostHe would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.Posted: 2025 Feb 27
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Once upon a time, Joan and I used to spend part of our winters in the Caribbean, or similar. I watched pelicans (brown? I don’t remember anymore) fishing. They fly along, big and more or less graceful birds — all birds in flight look graceful to me — but their fish-catching habit was anything but graceful. They hit the water in a Beetle-Bailey tangle of neck and bill and wings, which eventually resolved itself into a pelican sitting on the water with a beakful of… of… well, who knows. But it swallowed it anyway, and then lifted off in search of more things to crashwater on.
Jim T
Jim – I wonder why all of those diving-from-a-height birds don’t smash their brain cases when they hit the water. But I think pelicans are even funnier when coming in to land on water (as opposed to fishing). All of a sudden they seem to put the brakes on in a big panic, and then Sploosh! They’re down.
Neat photos, Isabel! Thank you for lightening my day!
Mary – Thanks! And you, mine.