(no subject)
Reading, Writing, and Birds
This morning while I was walking the dogs I heard a sound behind me, and turned just in time to see a flock of crows cruise in low over a fence, snap their wings mid-air and carom off over the Naval Weapons Station fields to the west. Usually my heart lifts at the sight, but not today, because it brought back memory of Saturday, when we gathered at my mother-in-law’s for cake. She sadly pointed out a broken nest in the middle of the grass, some thirty feet from a big Black Oak, wherein she explained the nest of sparrow fledglings had resided until crows attacked. She said she heard from her window the crows squawking and squalling angrily. When she got there, the crows had already flung the nest away from the tree, and the baby birds were gone. War in the bird world, no one knows why.
OTOH my bird, or a similar little gray pigeon, is back, and with a new mate, in the Easter basket nest I made under the sun canopy by the back sliding door.
I took down Patrick O’Brian’s The Unknown Shore. This book was written in 1959, some years before he commenced the adventures of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, and its tone and pacing are rather more young adult than adult. The book is not quite a sequel to The Golden Ocean, which is also based on the Anson expedition, but a companion piece, following characters on one of the other ships. The main characters are Jack Byron, in whom we can see an out-of-focus Jack Aubrey: big, competent at ship matters, good-natured. Mixes in the poetry the RL Admiral Byron wrote. But the true interest of the book is Tobias, Jack Byron’s friend, bought by an eccentric neighbor and raised according to enlightenment principles that produced a young man who can quote Latin and Greek by the book, yet sees no reason not to set out for a journey wearing list slippers, and who will fling himself off a horse, in the middle of a discussion, in order to hare through vile mud in chase of a bittern. He’s small, scrawny, with pale eyes, and is beloved by Jack’s noble cousin Georgiana, leading to a truly wonderful line after they return from their years’ long adventure. Tobias, magnificently unselfconscious in his old, weather-worn clothes, treads straight into an elegant drawing room, nips Georgiana away from a duke and a knight, and under their angry eyes says to the girl, “Come, sit with me and let us talk of bats.”
This morning while I was walking the dogs I heard a sound behind me, and turned just in time to see a flock of crows cruise in low over a fence, snap their wings mid-air and carom off over the Naval Weapons Station fields to the west. Usually my heart lifts at the sight, but not today, because it brought back memory of Saturday, when we gathered at my mother-in-law’s for cake. She sadly pointed out a broken nest in the middle of the grass, some thirty feet from a big Black Oak, wherein she explained the nest of sparrow fledglings had resided until crows attacked. She said she heard from her window the crows squawking and squalling angrily. When she got there, the crows had already flung the nest away from the tree, and the baby birds were gone. War in the bird world, no one knows why.
OTOH my bird, or a similar little gray pigeon, is back, and with a new mate, in the Easter basket nest I made under the sun canopy by the back sliding door.
I took down Patrick O’Brian’s The Unknown Shore. This book was written in 1959, some years before he commenced the adventures of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, and its tone and pacing are rather more young adult than adult. The book is not quite a sequel to The Golden Ocean, which is also based on the Anson expedition, but a companion piece, following characters on one of the other ships. The main characters are Jack Byron, in whom we can see an out-of-focus Jack Aubrey: big, competent at ship matters, good-natured. Mixes in the poetry the RL Admiral Byron wrote. But the true interest of the book is Tobias, Jack Byron’s friend, bought by an eccentric neighbor and raised according to enlightenment principles that produced a young man who can quote Latin and Greek by the book, yet sees no reason not to set out for a journey wearing list slippers, and who will fling himself off a horse, in the middle of a discussion, in order to hare through vile mud in chase of a bittern. He’s small, scrawny, with pale eyes, and is beloved by Jack’s noble cousin Georgiana, leading to a truly wonderful line after they return from their years’ long adventure. Tobias, magnificently unselfconscious in his old, weather-worn clothes, treads straight into an elegant drawing room, nips Georgiana away from a duke and a knight, and under their angry eyes says to the girl, “Come, sit with me and let us talk of bats.”