Beside the Stream

The nights are around 50F now, and the birds are packing on fat for migration.  There have been a lot of hummingbirds in the garden, but they like to feed at dusk.

I took dozens of low light hummingbird shots last week, and they’re all blurry.  Each of these birds are speedy fast, and jewel-like in their beauty. 

According to Wikipedia, a hummingbird that survives its first year is likely to live a decade or more.   

How could a little bird live so long in such a dangerous world?  

Beauty, speed, keen mental maps and luck hardly seem enough to keep such ethereal beings among us.   

At first we thought that a golden eagle was perched on the debris pile near the ditch,

but instead it was a turkey vulture, or buzzard.  Wikipedia says that, like storks, these birds often defecate on their own legs to cool themselves through the evaporation of the water in the feces and/or urine, a process known as urohidrosis.  See those white streaks on his feet? It’s uric acid!  Eeeeeew!

It looks like part of a rat is hanging from its beak.  I didn’t get a clear shot, but

it looks as though this giant bird took its rat along when he flew down the creek.

The turkey vulture isn’t the only scavenger that patrols this debris pile: Gracie finds dead animals here as well.  In the last three days, she has brought home a duck dripping with maggots, a squirrel missing most (but not all) of its guts, and 3/4 of a magpie.  She has many charming traits, but her affection for rotting corpses is not one of them. 

A flock of robins is wintering in an orchard down the road. 

A few of them regularly drop by to forage on a steep, south-facing slope near my office.  I thought it was a sign of global warning that they didn’t fly south, but instead

robins live here year round.  I had no idea!

Here’s a photo of a bobbing robin, with both feet off the ground. 
 

Here’s a picture of a stotting mule deer, all four feet off the ground.  (This is my edit of a photo from the biology department of the University of Regina in Canada).

Bobbing is a gerund of bob, and like many old words ’bob’ has many meanings.  In the robin’s case, it’s 

bob –verb (used with object)

2. to move quickly down and up: to bob the head

Origin:
1400–50; late Middle English bobben. )

The mule deer’s stot is from the same root as stutter.

stot –noun

1. a springing gait of certain bovids, as gazelles and antelopes, used esp. when running in alarm from a predator 

verb used without object

2. to run with such a gait

Origin:
special use of Scots, N England dial. stot bound, go by leaps, bounce; perh. akin to ME stuten to stutter 

It takes a special word to leap straight up in the air. 

Gravity and grave behavior keep us moored to earth, while all around us creatures are stotting and bobbing.  There’s a lesson about joy here, but I can’t put my finger on it.

A few mallard ducks spent the summer in our part of the irrigation ditch.  Those ducks had to avoid the neighborhood cats, bobcats, raccoons, skunks and coyotes.  Their survival depended on them keeping a low profile, so I left them strictly alone.

Bob told me this morning that they raised a few nests of ducklings while I was looking the other way.  There are now more than a dozen ducks hiding in the ditch, but they’re shy (here I’m spying on them behind a full set of greenery.)

This is one of the ducklings, a newly mature male mallard whose head and neck feathers are just coming in.

The rest of the flock is just around a bend.  I’m hiding behind grasses here, and as soon as they see me they swim away

and fly away.