"Finish each day and be done with it.

You have done what you could. Some

blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in;

forget them as soon as you can.

Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it

serenely and with too high a spirit to be

encumbered with your old nonsense.”

                              

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

I have been attemped to get shots of the

Crossbills in our neighbourhood, this

female was actually feeding on our front

yard. My blunder was using the autofocus

I got great shots of the spruce cones next

to her.

 

 

“it is discouraging to leave the past behind

only to see it coming toward you like

the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.” 

 

The Tunnel

                       

                         William H Gass

 

 

 

“Seeing, in the finest and broadest sense, means using

your senses, your intellect, and your emotions. It means

encountering your subject matter with your whole being.

It means looking beyond the labels of things and discovering

the remarkable world around you.” 

 

                                                    Freeman Patterson

 

Lunch time Friday at the Research Park

 

 

“A human being is a part of the whole called

by us universe, a part limited in time and space.

He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling

as something separated from the rest,

a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us,

restricting us to our personal desires and to affection

for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to

free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle

of compassion to embrace all living creatures

and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

 

Albert Einstein

 

“In the middle of work/we start longing fiercely 

for wide greenery/for the Wilderness itself, penetrated 

only/by the thin civilization of telephone wires.”

                                                         from On the Outskirts of Work
                                                                 Tomas Transtromer

 Saturday we were finishing walking 
the dogs when I heard the Crossbills 

again. They were across the street 

in an even taller tree than last week

and the tree was equally far from the alley 

and the street so the distance was a bit far

and the day overcast. The flock consisted 

of Red and White-winged Crossbills I did 

not see any Redpolls or Nuthatches but I only

had my camera no binoculars so they could

have been there.

Here you can compare the males of the two species.

  

Below a look at the crossed bill.

 

I saw the Flicker yesterday but did not get a 

good picture. But today the Red Shafted Flicker

appeared among our feeder birds. Thanks Kathie

"Seen from underneath everything is large,

As among gods.

The earthworm thinks it's thundering when you 

put your toe down.

From the dead's point of view, it's you who are in heaven."

from From Above, from Below and from the Side.

                      Rolf Jacobsen

"He disappeared in the dead of winter: 

The brooks were frozen, the airports 

almost deserted, And snow disfigured 

the public statues; The mercury sank in 

the mouth of the dying day. What instruments 

we have agree The day of his death was a 

dark cold day.

 Far from his illness The wolves ran on through 

the evergreen forests, The peasant river was 

untempted by the fashionable quays; By 

mourning tongues The death of the poet 

was kept from his poems" 

                   from  In Memory of W. B. Yeats

            W. H. Auden

Today as we took our long suffering dogs for their

walk I noticed bird calls from the spruce in front of

the house. Normally I post pictures of birds in the

spruce taken from our front window so I was happy

I had taken my camera with the chance at something 

different. Upon seeing this was a mixed flock

feeding at the top of the spruce I began snapping 

wildly and Helen graciously left me to it while

she was pulled around the block by two small white 

dogs. On November 24th I posted shots of a flock

of Red Crossbills and Red Breasted Nuthatches. This

flock contained Red Crossbills, White Winged 

Crossbills and Red Polls. It was great to see them

right outside our door, now I can think of them perched

there sheltering from the cold night air while I lay in bed.

( even if they are actually miles away )

The photos are not quite as good as the Nov

photos, our spruce is taller and today was overcast.

   

Lately I have been somewhat depressed by

the news I read and despite Robert Burton's 

warning about melancholy it is hard not to get 

caught up in it. While many people still seem 

to be in the rather childish stage of blaming

everyone but themselves for the broken vase, 

indeed they are still arguing about whether the vase 

( planet )  is broken, it is obvious that things are

changing. In Canada we have always taken a perverse

pride in our cold weather. Compared to the disasters taking

place around the world getting warmer is good. Except

that new pests will move north. Melting permafrost will 

disrupt communities and change the landscape. Insects that 

normally freeze will over winter, increase and spread. 

Climate changes and many animals will not adapt. A warmer 

north will open the Northwest passage to shipping and the tundra 

to increasing resource exploitation. I see no signs that we will 

distribute this new wealth more equitably  or extract it more 

responsibly than we did in the past. We will simply repeat the 

excesses and mistakes of the past, just as Auden said "For 

poetry makes nothing happen" ( In Memory of W. B. Yeats ) 

we seem to learn nothing from the lessons of history.

Possibly it is a universal that everyone, as they age sees 

the world they knew, believed existed,  (even if only in a 

somewhat romanticized world view), chance into something 

they barely recognize. To be realistic in many cases these 

changes are good. But still there are so many other things 

that are lost along the way.

Perhaps that is why I can still cherish the poems that mark 

the changing seasons by the calls of geese passing overhead 

a sound I can still hear today. And perhaps that is why tonight 

I will pretend that I can hear the drowsy cheep and muted rustling 

of the birds sheltering against the cold in the spruce at my front door.

"Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking 

of nothing at all and I saw the tree with lights in it. I saw 

the backyard cedar where. the mourning doves roost 

charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. 

I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was 

wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. 

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, 

knocked breathless by a powerful glance"

    from Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek

     Annie Dillard

 

"And the only poet is the wind,

a drifter

who walked in from the coast

with empty pockets

 

He stands on the road

at evening, making a sound

like a stone harp

strummed

by a handful of leaves...."

 

from The Stone Harp

John Haines

 

Irruption?

 

Thursday I went out on my lunch hour to photograph the

white tailed jackrabbits that have loped through my dreams

recently. While I encountered some, it was a flock of birds in the

spruce that spoke to me. I was initially uncertain if they

were Grosbeaks or Crossbirds but Red Crossbills they were.

One thing that confused me was that I kept seeing

Red Breasted Nuthatches in my camera. I had always

considered them the immobile resident birds of our front

yard spruce. Upon returning home some research told me

that they did indeed irrupt regularly moving about the

countryside, often in mixed species flocks. We do not see a

lot of bird species in the winter so these irruptions of birds 

 whether they be Snowy Owls, Mountain Ash seeking

Waxwings, or the flocks of Snow Buntings skittering across a cold

countryside are welcome additions to the prairie landscape.

The Crossbills are residents of the foothills near Calgary but I have

not seen one the the city for a couple of years perhaps they

are in town for dinner and a movie.Or a visit with their city cousins

the Nuthatches. There were perhaps 30-40 Crosbillls and

5-10 Nuthatches so I am not sure if that constitutes a true

irruption but it was fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found this nest at the base of a spruce

in the mountains some years ago. There was a large flock of

Crossbills in the trees so I have assumed this in a Crossbill nest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

" the seasons pass

just outside their hearing

but what they died for has faded away

and become something quite different

past justice and injustice"

 

        from The Battlefield at Batoche

                            Al Purdy