Along the north side of the Mississinewa Reservoir are several "State Recreation Areas", SRA's, each with distinctive attractions. One of my favorites has always been the shelter house at Frances Slocum SRA, but in recent years it has become a meeting spot for MSM, and I sometimes have lowered trust in my tolerance.

Today, it was wet and rainy, and no one was there, so my dogs had a couple of acres to make sport for themselves.

I sat on a picnic table in the shelter and watched an Osprey work the lake.

The water was choppy from the breeze, and I thought the raptor was too high to spot anydamthing.

This is reverse anthropomorphism, assigning human characteristics to animals, along with our shortcomings, including our visual prowess, or lack thereof.

According to Kate Davis, in Falcons of North America, "Raptors have at least two and a half - perhaps even as much as six or eight - times the visual acuity (ability to distinguish detail) of humans: theirs is possibly the most acute vision in the animal world. Plus they have fast vision, or the ability to assimilate detail rapidly".

Parallax, the bane of "affordable" binoculars, is an apparent displacement of orientation of an object, caused by changing one's line of sight with indiscernible eye adjustment, without actually moving the glass. Raptors utilize parallax error to determine distance. This is most obvious in the American Kestrel, often observed bobbing its head, to produce this effect.

So the big, beautiful, masterful Osprey was exactly where it needed to be, while I would need to stick my head underwater to have a chance of spotting prey.

Frances Slocum was born to East Pennsylvania Quakers in 1773 and taken by the Delaware Indians in the fall of 1778. She survived all and spent most of her years as Maconaquah (The Little Bear, and you can guess why), and when found by her brothers in 1837, "after years of persistent search" - from her gravestone/monument: persistent? like 60 damn years? only persistent? - she was completely assimilated, as one might imagine.

Despite that "The Little Bear" handle, she seems to have married well, and prospered, as did her children.

She died in 1847, aged 74, again a testament that our native Americans were hardly savages, didn't live in skin huts, and farmed and medicated quite successfully.

An odd story. The early summer of 1778 saw the Wyoming (Valley) Massacre near Wilkes-Barre, and most settlers fled the area. The Slocums chose to remain, and Frances was taken, bloodlessly, several months later. She survived the horrors of 1812-1813 along the Mississinewa and Upper Wabash. And her brothers conducted a "persistent search" for 60 years?

That's keeping the faith!