Bird Watching

Bird watching on a very cold day!

This photo received so many likes on facebook,
I just had to turn it into a blog post.

I especially appreciated Len's observation that
"Bird watching" = Subject + Verb!

And his comment: "Of course, the bird is watching you
(and noted "Kitti" in his lifetime person-log)."

On a more serious note,
some sobering bird thoughts from

Voices from Chernobyl
by Svetlana Alexievich
Winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature
"Question: Is the world as it’s depicted in words the real world? Words stand between the person and his soul.

"And I’ll say this: birds, and trees, and ants, they’re closer to me now than they were. I think about them, too. Man is frightening. And strange. But I don’t want to kill anyone here. I fish here, I have a rod. Yes. But I don’t shoot animals. And I don’t set traps. You don’t feel like killing anyone here."

~ Monologue About Repentance
(p 66, emphasis added)

**********************
"A strange thing happened to me. I became closer to animals. And trees, and birds. They’re closer to me than they were, the distance between us has narrowed. I go to the Zone now, all these years, I see a wild boar jumping out of an abandoned human house, and then an elk. That’s what I shoot. I want to make a film, to see everything through the eyes of an animal. 'What are you shooting?' people say to me. 'Look around you. There’s a war on in Chechnya.' But Saint Francis preached to the birds. He spoke to them as equals. What if these birds spoke to him in their language, and it wasn’t he who condescended to them?"

~ Sergei Gurin, cameraman
(p 114, emphasis added)

**********************
"You felt sorry for everyone there. Even the flies, even the pigeons. Everyone should be able to live. The flies should be able to fly, and the wasps, and the cockroaches should be able to crawl. You don't even want to hurt a cockroach."

~ Nina Kovaleva, wife of a liquidator
(p 174, emphasis added)

Back in September . . .

. . . and October