Watching The Birds

[gentlewind]

a favorite meditation of mine - watching seagulls soar and dive, and where we live we are blessed to have a constant display.

[Marblehead]

Yeah, seagulls are neat but just like pigeons, they aren't very friendly to automobiles.

[gentlewind]

tough on automobiles !!! great for my meditation!

 

On Sunday I was watching a seagull flying over our bungalow when I noticed a metallic spherical object in the sky, higher than the seagull. I went inside to get my binoculars but when I returned to get a better look at the object it had vanished,

 

Today a friend came round and told me her husband and a friend had seen the same object! What was it? I don't know! It wasn't a balloon, plane or helicopter thats for sure! Could it have been a drone? Shame I didn't have my camera to hand!

 

The truth - is it out there!!!

 

Back to seagulls! Jonathan Livingston Seagull - excellent book!

[Nungali]

Weird thing last night: over and over again a noise exactly like one made in the day time when a bird flys into a window - clump! Never heard that at night here before.

 

The only thing I could think is that the fish tank is up against a window and had a light shining down into it. Maybe if the fish where swimming around and something kept going for them from the outside ... but what? and at night too, its never happened in the day time. I didnt get to spot anything .

 

I turned the lights off and didnt hear it again.

 

Weird .

[silent thunder]

Do you have any of these giant moths in your area?

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=giant+moth&client=firefox-a&hs=kKk&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Pv3rU4juG8mrigKlx4GICQ&ved=0CB4QsAQ&biw=981&bih=663

[Nungali]

yeah but they make a lot softer fluttery noise when they do it, and a few close together This was just like a bird flying into a closed window from a few to 20 mins apart. .

 

The catfish eating inland night stalker ?

Edited August 14, 2014 by Nungali

[Marblehead]

There is a beetle that love the creeping trumpet flower and some of them are almost as big as the hummingbirds. Often I have to look twice to determine if what I am seeing is a hummer or a beetle.

[zerostao]

"Joyas Voladoras, " by Brian Doyle

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a

second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of

the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called

them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world

only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them

whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their

hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their

infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can

fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they

rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor,

their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly

to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is

sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds

who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests

and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and

purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills

and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-

tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you

have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart

silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense

ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen

at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries

are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to

gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia,

the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to

death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature.

It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature

on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them

slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a

hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons.

It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high,

bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon.

This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty

feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons

of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or

eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human

ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language,

social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There

are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the

largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with

the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their

piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts

with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with

one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven

single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid

eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No

living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a

moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or

husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the

house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a

constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and

sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally

are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character,

yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks

you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and

impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second

glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell

you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's

papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the

morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Edited August 20, 2014 by zerostao

[Marblehead]

A lot of heartbeats going on in that essay.

[Nungali]

Black cockatoo

 

 

They are back in the yard ... noisy , screechy ... screaming even. Eating the trees!

 

The move in before it rains "Oh ... thats an old wives tale ! "

 

Alright then; they move in ahead of a low pressure and/or high moisture front and exhibit a certain behavior and level of behaviour depending on the weather to come.

 

I am sure of it! One thing is they start chewing the trees apart, mostly wattles and gums, through the branches, thick ones - a series of bites can make a stepped cut, each as wide and deep as my thumb is - I find the wood on the ground, the bites stop at the witchety grub tunnels ,( I have pulled some of them out of the same wood when sawing and splitting it, they can be very thick and as long as from my wrist line to fingertips) and it makes this loud grating , crunching wood squeaking noise when they do it.

 

I even saw a loner, flying high in the sky a few weeks back and laughed myself at the supposed predictive omen, thinking "Oh, it must be going to rain a tiny little bit ." Well, 3 days later ( the usual predictive gap) some light cloud came over , in the midst of a virtual drought here, it spat a few drops and left.

 

Magnificent birds; sometimes they are near my head hight in the low branches of other thicker trees and we dont see each other until I walk past and then its a flurry on both sides, and I get to realise, up close, as they try to fly away, how big they actually are - flapping around just there in front of me !

[Nungali]

I wondered how much I was imagining due to being startled, so I looked it up ;

 

Reference was 110 cm wingspan !

 

Edited August 21, 2014 by Nungali

[gentlewind]

Still watching seagulls

 

and over the past week I've been meditating on butterflies!

[Marblehead]

and over the past week I've been meditating on butterflies!

I have had a few more butterflies the past couple weeks. The Lantana are not flowering (too hot and dry, I think) so the butterflies have gone to some of the other flowering plants.

[gentlewind]

I have named a crow Davros because he sounds like the leader of the Daleks - Any Dr Who fans here?!?!

[Marblehead]

Beware of naming things. It is then that we form attachments to them.

 

Crows are very smart birds. Not only can they be trained to do things but they can also find way of overcoming problems all on their own.

 

There are crows in the area where I live but I can't recall any having visited my place.

Edited September 26, 2014 by Marblehead

[gentlewind]

Beware of naming things. It is then that we form attachments to them.

 

Crows are very smart birds. No only can they be trained to do things but they can also find way of overcoming problems all on their own.

 

There are crows in the area where I live but I can't recall any having visited my place.

Davros is a welcome regular!

 

We are blessed with the variety of small and big birds here Marblehead! Love listening to the birds sing!

 

My wife saw a bat the other week, and then an owl! Nice!

We have also seen a number of UFO's - latest sighting was a few weeks ago at 6.10pm. The sky was cloudless as we monitored a plane making its way to somewhere when two white round ball shaped objects began darting underneath the plane!

 

We have become used to such sightings now and don't make a song and dance anymore!

[GrandmasterP]

Beware of naming things. It is then that we form attachments to them.

 

Crows are very smart birds. Not only can they be trained to do things but they can also find way of overcoming problems all on their own.

 

There are crows in the area where I live but I can't recall any having visited my place.

 

Best book I ever read about Crows is Mark Cocker's 'Crow Country'.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crow-Country-Mark-Cocker/dp/0099485087/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411738822&sr=1-1&keywords=crow+country

Fantastic read and beautifully written.

[Marblehead]

Davros is a welcome regular!

 

We are blessed with the variety of small and big birds here Marblehead! Love listening to the birds sing!

 

My wife saw a bat the other week, and then an owl! Nice!

Yes, it is nice when we see the variety of life. Even in the birds. Funny, I just want to say that bats ain't birds. Hehehe. Just recently watched a documentary about the Congo and they included a bit about fruit bats that gather, once a year, in a certain area for feeding and mating. The estimated number of individuals is at over 10 million. They feed and mate and about two weeks later they all return to their native areas.

 

And, of course, we won't talk about UFOs. We have already been there.

[GrandmasterP]

Fruit bat poo makes fabulous fertiliser.

There's a cottage industry round those roosts in bagging up and selling on bat shit.

The people who do that work only have a short window to gather up the shit and it is a competitive business so they are under a lot of pressure to get the job done.

Some of the workers 'crack' under the pressure hence...

" Bat Shit Crazy"

Just thought I'd mention that.

Edited September 26, 2014 by GrandmasterP

[silent thunder]

 

"Joyas Voladoras, " by Brian Doyle

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a

second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of

the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called

them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world

only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them

whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their

hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their

infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can

fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they

rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor,

their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly

to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is

sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds

who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests

and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and

purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills

and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-

tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you

have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart

silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense

ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen

at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries

are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to

gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia,

the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to

death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature.

It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature

on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them

slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a

hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons.

It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high,

bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon.

This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty

feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons

of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or

eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human

ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language,

social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There

are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the

largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with

the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their

piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts

with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with

one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven

single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid

eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No

living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a

moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or

husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the

house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a

constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and

sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally

are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character,

yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks

you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and

impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second

glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell

you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's

papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the

morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

*deep bow*

Thank you. What an amazing thing to wake up to...

Wow...

[zerostao]

Best book I ever read about Crows is Mark Cocker's 'Crow Country'. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crow-Country-Mark-Cocker/dp/0099485087/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411738822&sr=1-1&keywords=crow+country Fantastic read and beautifully written.

i may check that out gmp. i read this one last year

http://yalepress.yale.edu/Yupbooks/reviews.asp?isbn=9780300122558

 

the other morning after checking out the sunrise i came upon a feral cat that was creeping over some boulders towards a lone crow eating breakfast. the crow noticed how the cat fled disturbed by my arriving on the scene. nonchalant, the crow continued eating the morning meal but did give a curtesy caw caw as i passed on by.

[Marblehead]

But cats have to eat too!

[gentlewind]

if it flies then hey, lets include it

got at least two wings

then its a hit!

 

even those objects

of metallic shape and form

can be included even though

we know not what they are

and if they have really

travelled from afar

 

so all things which fly

can be included

in this most fine thread

Christ! even the dead

can fly!!!!

so me oh my

let us try.

[GrandmasterP]

I watched a plump pigeon see off a Magpie this week.

Mano a mano I'd have thought that a Magpie would beat a pigeon but not that one.

Been wondering since if it was just an isolated wuss of a Magpie or if feral pigeons aren't maybe a bit tougher than I had imagined.

Edited September 27, 2014 by GrandmasterP

[Marblehead]

Well, considering that pigeons live in every part of the world except Antarctica it should be a given that they are pretty tough birds.