Beer!

"My" red tail at Pearson's Mill came in off the lake high, maybe 200 feet, over the small cliffs and the trees on the hills that rise to the north. Soaring into a northwest wind, flying as the master of the sky he is.

No jealousy, only admiration and the purest love.

Something of interest came to light today from its hidey-hole between the covers of a book, "Falconer on the Edge", by Rachel Dickinson. The eyes of the peregrine falcon are so large they are separated in the skull only by a membrane. The eye of the peregrine has two foveae, the small pit in the eye composed entirely of cones (of "rods and cones" fame) and responsible for the sharpest, clearest vision.

Your eye has one.

The bird goes into an accelerated dive (stoop) from up to several thousand feet in the air and strikes prey with an impact that explodes feathers off birds five, six, seven times its size.

The stoop isn't a long roaring swoop. The path describes a gentle spiral, as this awesome predator uses all four foveae and the constantly changing aspect of perception to provide true stereoscopic vision and enable the falcon to deliver a fatal blow to a usually flying (as in moving! as fast as terror can motivate!) large bird, with infrequent damage to itself.

Okay, quick lesson. You have never travelled at 200 mph, except in an airplane with no fixed point of reference. So get down to a speed you can work with, 50 mph, about 25% of the peregrine's impact velocity. Your homework: drive your car at 50 mph into a brick wall, obliterating it, but not so much as scratching the car.

Yeah, it's that amazing.

As some of you surely know, I am slightly unbalanced.

Okay, that's like saying televangelists and faith healers are slightly unscrupulous.

To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, I will pay attention when one regenerates a missing limb.

So this frozen world is starting to irritate me.

Everything is dirty, outside and in. Outside, there's not been enough rain to move the dregs of the past few months. And inside - I burn wood for heat, and it's been going full speed since I got home Thanksgiving Day. There's soot, ash, grime and dust on everything, everywhere. I can wipe down anything in the morning, and by evening a kleenex passed over it comes up blackened.

Thank the Blessed Sisters of Divine Mercy it's snowing again. Now.

I've always felt "brewing" was a deceptive term when applied to making beer. Maybe because my first exposure to the word was in reference to preparing proper tea, correctly "steeping".

The single most important step in making beer - not to minimize others - is fermentation. Where yeasts convert the sugars into alcohol, the soul of the matter.

There are two basic operators in this process: top-down and bottom-up, or cold, fermentation.

Top-down yeasts make a foam of activity on the surface of the wort (all the ingredients combined, before filtering) and the tiny used-up sugars give the beer a dark color as they settle - ales, pale ales, stouts, porters.

Bottom-up yeasts require much cooler fermenting temperatures, and all the stuff stays on the bottom. The beers, lagers and pilsners, are the classic golden color, and lager is the preferred beer in America, accounting for as much as 90% of the beer sold (my guess), maybe more.

So what, besides color, is the difference?

Why do some people prefer lagers and pilsners in the summer, ales, porters, and stouts in the colder months?

The body, or taste, of a lager or pilsner is in your mouth, making it more "refreshing" when you're thirsty.

The full flavors of dark brews release on the palate. Mix the sip in your mouth, there's almost no sensation. Swallow it slowly, and appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into a fine bottle of ale.

My home brew experience was a different beast entirely.

Home brewers necessarily start with ales, because most can't get a five-gallon bottle of wort to a consistent 40 degrees F.

Everything is easy until that all-important fermentation step.

The problem is sanitation. One must totally sterilize all equipment.

Household hint: if you sanitize with bleach, it takes a full 12 minutes to kill all the bad guys. No cheating. Time 15 minutes to be sure.

Yeast is a living, breathing organism. If there is enough remnant sanitizer, a portion of the yeast you add, at a cost, will die. When this happens, your high-priced homebrew will have a watery phenolic flavor, and it is all but unpalatable. Keep enough cash to get a store-bought box when you crack your first homebrew.

I spent about $300 brewing two cases of undrinkable bilge. I couldn't make a suitable habitat for the yeast to prosper. Couldn't figure how to clean stuff and leave it clean, not lethal.

Don't know what I was afraid of. Yeast infection? In my experience, that tastes awful. Makes you wonder if your Special Someone has been sleeping with a baker.

Successful homebrewers are fortunate, no tax, control of every ingredient, every step.

Amateurs must be prepared to "brew" bottle after bottle of home-made urine.

Question: would it be pure joy to launch a 1 1/2 lb. falcon from your wrist, watch it climb to a half-mile high in a clear blue sky, then see it streak down at speeds close to an Indy racer, and turn a hurtling duck into feathers and a roast?

Where to Fish, What Not to Wear, When to See Birds

Asked a Bass Pro (read: anyone who ever entered a tournament) where he would go if he had to catch a largemouth bass.

Lake Webster.

There was a program on some stations that sold a magazine, Midwest Outdoors, neither of which I've seen for some time. Both may surely be around.

One segment featured muskie (not Ed) fishing on Webster. The pair of experts became frustrated as they caught nothing but bass. That would thrill all but meat fishers and guys filming a program about catching muskie. I don't recall them catching even one.

Know that muskies would test the patience of a herd of Jobs, that dedicated types may go a year without ever sniffing one.

I could never be a muskie fisherman, as my patience flees in terror in less than a minute.

I was looking down food aisles in a box store last week when my field of vision filled with a woman in chartreuse slacks and a bright orange hoodie. The slacks actually had the cut, drape and fit of pajama bottoms, and the hoodie was more a sack than a shirt. I laugh out loud in public about twice per year, so I'm paid up through June. Because the pumpkin orange hood was up.

When I was a youngster, 1960 and then abouts, I had a morning paper route. Okay, it started out mornings, up and out in the dark, but it gets light much later in winter, and, in winter, you have to see where you are going, and it got to where I had to have first period free to finish up.

At that time, the Sunday Indianapolis Star was so thick most carriers couldn't finish the route in one trip.

All the advertisements were print ads, not fold-ins. Thursday papers carried the weekend sales and specials (no malls), and the Thursday Star was thicker (heavier) than two weeks' copies of the paper today.

The carrier was given a bill weekly, and expected to collect enough money from customers to pay it, the balance being salary. The Star cost 40 cents weekly, 25 cents Sunday only. Extra service, such as putting the paper inside the storm door, was free as requested, tipping optional.

Unless you worked with this scheme, you cannot possibly believe how many people dodged this bill, some for months.

The carrier was not allowed to discontinue service, and was expected to develop the salesmanship skills to collect from recalcitrant customers, some of whom hid in their houses from a 12-year-old.

Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday papers you could fold and fly with accuracy up to twenty yards. Wednesday and Friday papers, some times, and Thursday editions, always, were rolled and rubber banded, which you bought. Sunday papers were delivered flat.

Those rolled Thursday papers were clubs. Plexiglas was a thing of the future, and long-time debtors could expect to replace some glass. Maybe not just once, depending on the carrier's judgement and patience.

A plus was the option to purchase monthly magazines at a weekly cost, like 12 cents each. I bought Argosy and True, two men's magazines of outstanding quality and dubious reliability, long since vanished.

I also subscribed to Field & Stream, the nation's first and best outdoors magazine. It contained articles about dream trips and things a kid could do, now. One feature was "Solunar Tables", which I assume they still run, but are also available on-line.

Theses tables list four periods daily, two "major" and two "minor", when fish and wildlife are active. The charts are extraordinarily accurate. For one, if you start catching fish, you may notice an increase in bird chatter and movement. I've tracked this for 50 years and it is amazing. You can check it from the comfort of home. Chart a couple periods then turn down all that noise and listen.

If you have unlimited time for outdoor pursuits, you don't need these data. But to maximize your chances for observation, hunting, or fishing, check the tables and be out and active when nature is, during the major periods.

A bird's day, sans breeding and migration, is four activities, repeated once. Not in order, they are resting, taking water, eating, and taking grit. That's about it. As you observe birds, they will be engaged in one of these, but not usually resting, which isn't a public activity, to maintain Homeland Security.

At Pearson's Mill SRA, a train of Northern Cardinals, four males then a female, crossed the road from the woods towards the reservoir. Gorgeous. Brilliant scarlet in the grey day.

And on the way out, a kestrel on a wire. Looking robust, and you really, really hope so in this weather, that he's not just fluffed to keep warm.

I've written of a low-spot pond just north and east of here. I ignored it for years, until I spotted a Great Blue Heron stalking it, never having guessed it held fish. This awful winter, a pair of red tails chose to ride it out there, and they were perched in the low trees this afternoon. I think they hunt Converse Cemetery - their potential territory would encompass both, with miles square to spare.

Oh yeah. The tortoise. Her first name is "Clia".

More on her later.

Remind me.

For Tillie
God Bless You! I love you and admire your courage and resolve! Get well quickly and totally!

Vain Darlings

Who are these media stars?

Glenn Beck, a bona-fide lunatic whose talking points no one in the universe is prepared to understand, and Rush Limbaugh, a homosexual pedophile so depraved he has to take dick stiffeners to sodomize little boys. They draw high approval ratings from comatose subhuman sheep, any of whom thinks he or she invented masturbation, and the thought process shut down soon after.

Limbaugh's fans are called "ditto" heads, because "fuck" and "shit" are much too descriptive for the FCC. The minimum age for an FCC watchdog must be "on life support". It's supposed to be information, not a day in church.

Walking the road at Pearson Mill SRA last week, I fetched a Coke can and a beer bottle up out of the snow-filled roadside ditch. What lowly-ranked lifeform in the category "dregs of society" would throw trash out the car window in an SRA? Given, the two suet brains mentioned previously. But after that?

I always called these "people" pigs, but my lovely friend Anne taught me to appreciate this is an unfair aspersion on swine universal.

The beer bottle was a micro-, formerly exclusive, by price.

The repeated reapplication/raising of the "sin tax", which crushes lower-income addicts of legal substances, tobacco and alcohol, destroy families daily, hourly.

Some of the brightest, strongest people I know can't quit smoking, and alcohol is a come-along on your brain, and you can wear your fingers to stubs trying to get some slack.

All the very best to those that make it.

Addiction is an inherited trait, and you get some, or a lot.

"Sin"? Where does this crap come from? How justify taxing an addict for a predetermined affliction, even as most are middle-to-low income, if any, trying to set aside enough money to support the family

Sinners? An addict can't be a sinner. A multimillionaire who buys dick pills so he can pay to sodomize little boys is a sinner.

Just my opinion.

Okay, that's not true. People should know about this crap. Except when they do they ignore it.

Ever wonder how jack-shit claims become popular? Supporters ignore the obvious.

I have a wonderful and beautiful sister who Limbaugh would call a Fema-Nazi. I refuse to label this "horseshit", which is totally organic and mostly odor-free.

She has an understandably myopic habit of adopting trite catch-phrases in regards important issues, such as "If breast cancer caused penises to fall off, a cancer cure would have been found decades ago."

According to the American Cancer Society's self-reporting, they took in $1.09 billion in FY 2008, and spent $1.04 billion.

Little room to ignore one cancer target zone for another.

Here are two cancer "facts", endorsed by me, only: the trigger for the onset of cancer should and will be found in our so-called "junk" DNA, where a string of undecoded sequence provokes rapid regeneration of malformed cells. Secondly, despite all the hype and all the criticism from people for whom zygotes are sentient beings, stem cells, with the capacity to generate countless cells for any tissue or organ, hold the quickest, surest cure.

People are constantly reminded here to slow down and observe, but the preacher doesn't always practice... As I passed a bird on a wire this morning I was sure was an American Kestrel, I knew I was wrong. A small hawk, not a falcon, surely a male sharp-shin.

Sharp shinneds are incredible little raptors, fearsome at an ounce to a pound of prey, and always a wonder to observe, except for a sixty-year-old man with his head so far up his own ass the real wonder is he saw the beautiful little bird at all.

This afternoon I saw another "old friend" red tail at the Converse Cemetery. On a bleak rainy day like today, the underside of a red tail passing overhead gleams, whiter than falling snow. Like Lennie in "Of Mice and Men" you want to hold and pet and stroke "your" hawks, but they aren't into all that.

Raptors are true Lords and Ladies, Rulers of the Air, and may accept you as a caretaker and provider in a captured state, but affection is out of bounds. You are not worthy. You are but an earth-bound lackey, privileged to attend the wants of Royalty.

And that is a privilege few of us get to appreciate.

According to a recent Harris Poll (great fun! http//news.harrisinteractive.com/), Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday Monday was largely ignored, was the best president in history, with 32% of the votes cast by 2756, 18 years and older respondents.
Oddly, sadly, Ronald Reagan, the drugstore cowboy, was named both the second best in history and the best president since WW II, according to those polled.
Apparently the Iran-Contra affair, where weapons were sold to Iran through Israel to secure money to fund Sandinistas and other anticommunist forces in Nicaragua, has been conveniently forgotten. A selling point to secure Ronnie's approval was that Iran would then pressure Hezbollah to release some fifty Americans taken as hostages in Lebanon.
This program was hugely screwed when, after a botched delivery of Hawk missiles and a failed meeting, a wing of Hezbollah took down Arrow Air Flight 1285 after takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland, killing all 254 aboard, including 248 American soldiers returning from 6 months in the Sinai.
Reagan's response: deny and destroy. Deny any knowledge, destroy all pertinent documents.
To help you understand the conservative mind, consider: Oliver North, a staff-grade Marine Light Colonel, did time in prison for submitting suggestions no one should have even acknowledged, let alone approved. North has since become a conservative media darling, with best selling books and radio and television shows, the latter currently on FOX (surprise!).
In April 1983, 63 Americans were killed in a truck bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut.
And, on October 23, 1983, 241 US military personnel, including 220 Marines, were killed in the bombing of the marine barracks near the airport in Beirut.
President Hawk Reagan's response? all marines were pulled from Lebanon three months later.
This was the largest single casualty count for the USMC since Iwo Jima. All must be proud of that withdrawal.
The highest-stressed job in the US is an air traffic controller. Bleeding ulcers plague every one in his 20's, and ATC's are prone to all manner of addiction and total breakdown, including premature death.
On August 3, 1981, ATC's went on strike, ostensibly for benefits but primarily to get updates for their 20-year-old equipment, which reloaded once a minute and displayed airliners full of hundreds of people as fuzzy green blips every 12 seconds - as in they moved every five blips, terrorizingly slow when you have sixty hanging in the air awaiting your instructions.
So what does a ridiculously successful B movie actor do?
Why, fire 11,345 of them, and ban them from civil service for life, or however much of it this job has allocated them.
Washington, DC, recognized the depravity of this heinous action by renaming Dulles Airport "Reagan International". Any ATC who goes to work there is a fucking scab, every time he/she clocks in.

For the record, 1% of the respondents voted H.W. and W as the best presidents since The Big One.
WTF?
Name one thing either accomplished? (and if you say The Patriot Act, I will craptrap your porch.)
HW screwed around and killed about 24 million Iraqis, even though he encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait. Soon after, he reneged on a promise to protect the Kurds, and Chemical Ali unleashed barrages of chemical weapons on them, killing 300,000 and terminally diseasing countless others.
And W, who stood at "ground zero" (a term I despise, as it cheapens its definition, the locus of the impact of a nuclear weapon) and swore to rebuild the New York Police and Fire Departments. How about you, just for grins, Google how many NYC Police Stations & Fire Barns have closed since that 9/14/01 day of typical Bush family bullshit.
Harris is a distinguished and reliable pollster, successful such that they can make these data available free of charge.
The question thus becomes "How fucking stupid are we?"
The results of that poll aren't in, but are sure to approximate "dumber than goatshit".

Despite the continued refrigerator temperatures (don't you wish you had stacked all that stuff in your yard and turned the damn thing off about three months ago?) I've seen a few warmbloods out and about. There was a cute little raccoon who stared at me from behind a small forked tree thirty feet away while I layered up a few days ago. My dogs didn't sense him, and he watched for the five minutes it took me to leave.

Last evening my collie pup found an opossum along the rail/trail. It was typically nasty, pink snout and a mouth full of teeth, a rat tail on the other end, and a dirty humped lump in between. My Sun was understandably disgusted, stopping and barking twenty feet shy.

The wild things are as tired of this cold and snow as we are, and anxious to get about with life's business.

"Maybe"

The sky now divides
To bring you back into the fold
Welcome home

Still my need to recognize
Any comfort you might share
Only grows

Guess I'll learn to accommodate
While my heart just sits and waits

Maybe God you found
Maybe is all you can offer now

Where am I to take refuge
When the storms of pain release
Shelter me

This blessedness of life
Sometimes brings me to my knees
I call on thee

I have not the words to write
A farewell to you tonight

Maybe God you found
Maybe is all that you can offer now

I know hearts are weeping
While your pure voice is loudly singing
Angel on high, Angel on high

Saw "my" red tail at Pearson Mill SRA today. A bonus! He is exceptionally white down under and gorgeous even while flying away. The last two days he has taken wing out over the reservoir, a rare, unobstructed-view treat.

Since I have made efforts for over 35 years to overcome my "Woman-on-a Pedestal" Boomer mentality, I feel obligated to explain why I choose the pronoun "he".

In the Raptor World, male and female differences are expressed in relative size, not color. A female Northern Cardinal is a muted lavender, while the male is the brightest red.

And the females rule the roost, always.

That is a key.

If "my" red tail was a female, she would have ninety potential suitors crowding her day and night, until she drove off eighty-nine of them.

There was an American Kestrel on a wire along the access road to the SRA yesterday. First time I've seen one in the area, which I have visited routinely since last summer.
His (see above) colors were brilliant and beautiful, even on a cold, gloomy mid-winter day.

The song is "Maybe", written by Ed Rowland, a superlative singer/songwriter, who fronts a good band, Collective Soul.

This song was written for Kib Browning.

It is here officially rededicated to Kristal Danae, who chose, on a late, cool night in early June, to tackle a semi rather than face whatever waited for her in her bedroom.

I have turned this over and over since early June, daily, over and over again. It always comes back to one thing.

There is only that one thing that could force a beautiful 14 year old girl out of her house late on a cool June night and into the mouth of a semi.

I am haunted. I knew Kristal was miserable, as was her mother, and I failed her completely by not recognizing her despair.

I visit her grave often, a sorry substitute for not saving her.

There is a peace in the ground that had to be worth the taste of a 60 mph hog hauler.

Indiana Turns to Mushers

Okay, just so you know, the Iditarod has been moved to Indiana, which has the snow and the ridiculous temps, and is much more accessible than Alaska, except for the totally demented who choose to live there. Which is everybody except the Inuit and other tribes, imprisoned in the most recent glacial period of the Pleistocene, the Wisconsin("ian", quite obviously unnecessary) and have been living (really, that's the term) above the Arctic Circle for 10,000 to 12,000 years. That's 8 - 10K BC, and 2 - 4K before the universe was created, according to some.

The Inuit would come on south and give it a go, except they know US History, and what happened to other original residents, and know if they leave for even a day their lands will be appropriated by developers and turned into game "preserves" (if anyone knows why this word is used in this context, please advise) so wealthy teeny weenies can shoot polar bear and caribou from the comfort of a private helicopter.

Susan Butcher and her ilk will no doubt compete in our 20's temps in shorts and tank tops, but it will be uber-cool to see them trekking through Carmel as their dogs run themselves to death.

Great sport.

I went to Pearson's Mill SRA yesterday for a somewhat truncated walk. The loop to the boat ramp hadn't been plowed or otherwise traversed, and I wasn't up to pushing snow. About 80% was open, and it was a pleasant walk. I had my coat open much of the way, and off the rest.

That kind of pleasant.

I saw one of my "friends", a red tail that I've seen since mid-December. He (guess) is a bit of a recluse, and I always see him flying away.

A couple of miles south of the reservoir, there's what started out as a creek that someone attempted to dam and cultivate.

An interesting study is to cruise the county roads after heavy spring rains. Relief features you have never noticed are now creeks, large and small, surface reflections of the water table.

In northern Indiana, from about 40 miles south of Indianapolis, that water table was built in the Wisconsin(ian) glacial period.

You know, before the universe was created.

No amount of applied modern agricultural technology can affect the subsurface contours of the water table.

By the by, that demarcation 40 miles south of Indy can be seen from any tall building there. It's a terminal moraine, the extent of the grinding, gouging leveling of ice 2 miles thick. South of that feature is karst topography, limestone, water soluble. All caves in Indiana are south of that moraine.

My little low spot failed to grow crops years ago, and there are several trees approaching maturity around its perimeter. I have no clue how deep it is, but it held water through the summer and fall, and my attention was first drawn by great blue herons, so there must be significant aquatic life.

As the soybeans and corn across the road matured, there were deer in the evening, exercise for my Abbe.

Now the pair of red tails from my town area are wintering there, and I saw one to the west end in a tree yesterday.

Another "friend".

I'm sure these were the hawks I watched all autumn around the Converse cemetery. I won't guess if this is the superpredator I twice saw on the roadsigns at Oak Hill Schools. There was a red tail a couple miles east much of the summer, and that territory fit better in my ordered mind.

Which means less than nothing to any self-respecting hawk.

FYI, the public domain red tail photo above makes a spectacular background on a bigscreen monitor. If my image doesn't work, let me know and I'll provide the public domain link.

Dick Butkus Shoulders

There's a football game on, easily the most overrated, over hyped "event" in my lifetime. Proof: who finished second in the last five Super Bowls? If you're good enough to play a game for immortality, shouldn't you be remembered?

The Indianapolis Colts are playing, and I don't care enough to watch. When I earned my stripes as an NFL fan, they were the Baltimore Colts, and I didn't like them then, surely not Saint John Unitas, exalted as one of the greats, ever. Baltimore did play in two SB's in those years, but ChristInCleats (and you thought that was Joe Montana, who won four) only played in one. His back-up, Earl Morrall, played in the loss to the New York Jets, making a hero of the extraordinarily disgusting Joe Namath.
Unitas started in SB V, but left the game in the second quarter. Morrall finished the win.

There were a couple players I liked from those Colts teams. Tom Matte, a running back that played hard, always, and Mike Curtis, the best middle linebacker in the game until Mr. Butkus came along.

I wanted to refer to my little falcon as having Jack Lambert shoulders, but felt the best middle linebacker in the history of the NFL might have escaped the notice of some non-fans, while Butkus was in movies and at least one current television commercial.

Since American Kestrels sit tight on the wire in winter, they can be indistinguishable through your windshield on a drear winter day from say, a turtle dove (Mourning dove - probably mourning the thousands and thousands of doves, a symbol of peace, shot annually for "sport"). They are the same size, and colors fade in leaden skies, but a turtle dove has a long neck and tiny head. Don't fret over that "bird brain": they fly at speeds up to 55 mph, and if you doubt the thought and coordination necessary, put a typical 12-year-old behind the wheel of your car and press the accelerator up to that speed. Enjoy hospitalization, at best.

The kestrel has massive "shoulders" and, practically, no neck, and is distinctive in the bleakest conditions.

Admire, and enjoy.

Of course you'll have to slow down, and get off the damn cellphone. And do your part to save lives: never, ever, text message while driving.

Creationists "believe" the earth is about 8,000 years old. Belief, faith, are terms used to qualify irrational subscription to theories with no empirical proof or supporting evidence of any kind. 8,000 years isn't long enough to account for all the snow in Indiana.

On Groundhog Day, the sun shone brightly, but our groundhog couldn't see his shadow because he was snowed in, in the dark, hibernating peacefully.

Hibernation is a much-underrated activity, or lack thereof, a talent we lost the capacity for sometime in the 5 1/2 billion-year history of our planet. And check it, because in your lifetime that age will grow, as much as another billion years. Remember, the current estimate is based on evidence found and examined, namely meteors, and there are tons more to be found, analyzed, and dated.

Algae fossils five billion years old have been validated. You carry the DNA from that algae, with some other, in every cell in your body.

For sure.

8,000 years, indeed.

Neanderthals were gone about 30,000 years ago. They left with the largest brains of any hominid. I'm guessing they knew the earth was older than creationists "believe".

Oh my, how I love the snow! And boogers and zits and snot and toe jamb and crotch rot and pit sweat and wet socks and cheese stains and toothaches and old rockers and, well, you got it.

Took a mile (signposts) walk this evening on the Sweetser rails-to-trails. My dogs and I were the only breathing bodies in the blizzard. It was beautiful. The wind was (mostly) blocked, and the bushes were piled with snow. Not all that cold, and the footing was the best it's gonna be the next several days.

Was up at Pearson's Mill earlier in the week, kind of moping along, trying to keep my dogs out of the carcasses and the real stinky stuff, when an Eastern Bluebird flew across the road about fifteen feet above.

Which put me about fifteen miles high. Confession: I lived well over 50 years without ever seeing a bluebird. And now I know what the to-do is about (Buffalo Springfield comes to mind).

Just a most totally wonderful bird.

I watched a little, probably pre-school, girl get out of a car, followed by mommy with a cigarette burning in her pie hole. What's a car interior, about eight cubic feet? How long does it take a lit cigarette to turn that space into a gas chamber? Two minutes, three tops? Cigarette smoke has been a known carcinogen for at least fifty years.

You can fit this mother's love in a box the size of a cigarette pack.

What kind of god lets people - mothers - do this to their children? If it's free choice, then this mother is not equipped to make the decision.

There are hawks hanging about, and becoming familiar, like they are my hawks.

More so the red tails, as their "territory" becomes evident to me.

The American Kestrels are always a surprise, more discreet than warm-weather birds. Summer kestrels always fly as you pass, circling back to the perch. Winter kestrels sit tight, and in this bleak winter there isn't enough light to see those beautiful colors, and you either note the distinctive shoulder set or you guess.

This morning I watched a red tail floating on a building east wind, maybe a half mile, before he (guess) flapped a bit with the breeze and began a descent, out of sight.

If you watch a soaring or gliding hawk, and, even with glass, can't detect any tail movement, remember a NOVA feature where they mounted a camera to focus on the tail of a hawk, to see what role that broad tail played in flight dynamics. This project, for this application, cost tens of thousands of dollars, and showed that the tail was critical for flight but moved almost imperceptibly. I think the researchers were very disappointed with the findings. And they missed the point.

Aircraft are designed with massive fixed wings. Birds use wings for every facet of flight, except aspect and balance. These two most critical functions are controlled by the tail, the bird gyroscope.

The researchers, who spent a lot of money focusing on the tail, were disappointed at the lack of activity (movement), and missed that the set of the tail is hypercritical for successful flight.

We spend billions and billions flying airplanes, and still haven't dissected the mechanics of the success of the "bird brains" who fly effortlessly.

And we are the smart ones.