Bird Watching

Okay, a frank, open admission: I am helplessly, hopelessly, totally in love with Neko Case.

She wasn't lost, or undiscovered, so I didn't "find" or "discover" her, except for me.

Just fucking wow.

A pox on any of you aware of her music who didn't clue me in.

I title-picked 10 songs from her iTunes library and there isn't anything but wonderful in the handsful.

In my seventh decade (Stinkin' in the Sixties), hearing her new is knowing I've wasted decades listening to some rather weak shit.

Beatles, my fucking ass. Neko brings more voice to the table than the Blab Four, in any combination.

Neko Case. Perhaps the only person in the world I would pay money to see.

The first indigo bunting I saw was dead in a road near Noblesville. There was a lunatic dab of feathers, and I got out to look. That incandescent, iridescent, high-amped electric blue was otherworldly, but much too there to be faked.

If you have never seen an indigo bunting up close, or through reasonably good glass in favorable light, you are in debt to yourself.

Luck is with you! Throughout north central Indiana, there is seldom a mile stretch of wire without indigo buntings perched. Not together. When you see a tiny wee bird, stop well ahead, inside the useful range of your glass, check it out. Be ready.

Should you think that the only place for photography to go is through more filters, manipulating and overlaying exposures, and digital enhancement, know that there is no photo extant that even begins to capture the the glorious color of the indigo bunting.

Northern Cardinals, our cardinals, do not perch on wires. They are more thicket types, but cannot begin to hide the pure red in most cover, even in summer foliage.

In the spring and fall, migration of a sub family, the wood warblers, passes through the state. Very active, with beautiful, distinctive songs, these are the "it" birds for many bird watchers.

There are 20 or so species en passage, and, like our cardinals, they mostly prefer thickets.

Unlike our cardinals, they are small, and mostly vary by the location of a yellow splotch the size of a dime. If you know the songs, and you have the time and patience, you are belly-up to the bar of outstanding bird-watching.

And if you don't? There is much consolation in the presence of a more or less equal number of sparrow species. While they lack the panache of warblers, they are distinctive, more readily found, and don't have different spring and fall colors like warblers. Forgot to mention that? Sorry.I would love to be a warbler man, but I feel that time has passed. I am attracted more to raptors, who eat warblers. There must have been a first guy who looked at a salad set before him and said, "This isn't food. This is what food eats."

It is most surely gratifying to identify a yellow-rumped warbler, then watch, enthralled, as he picks about after seeds, berries, bugs, and such.

I watch transfixed as an American Kestrel swoops down on a sparrow, not much the smaller, and drives it into the ground.

There have been models for over a hundred years now of what dinosaurs looked like.

If they had originally been drawn as birds, and fitted over dino skeletons as they were re-assembled, the picture would be all but clear.

It's not easy for me to look at my chickens pecking through the yard and think of Thunder Lizards.

But look into the crazy-insane red-burning eye of a sharp-shinned hawk, and 300 million years melt away.