I can't sleep…
Atlantic Brant’s are back for a pit stop before heading north. More pictures from this morning’s walk here.
If you’ve never heard the call of an Atlantic Brant, listen here. “The Atlantic brant makes a low, guttural ruk-ruk sound, and its call pattern is flat, rising, and undulating. Brant also make a guttural crrrronk when flying or on the ground, and a shorter, sharper cruk alarm call. (via Google)”
6 geese-a-laying, 4 swans-a-flying. And one was our little cygnet all grown up and soaring.
Had I not been standing there, I would have bet background was A.I. generated – no A.I. this morning. Nature’s Magic. Sept 3, 2023. 6:49 a.m. 66° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
More photos from this morning’s walk here including Sunrise & Wally on morning walk.
The lesson, so simple yet so difficult, is that life can be savored even though it contains hardship, disappointment, loss, and even brutality. The choice to see its beauty is available to us at every moment.
— David Von Drehle, The Book of Charlie: Wisdom From the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man (Simon & Schuster, May 23, 2023)
Notes:
“Beautiful, dramatic and a little bit scary’: Danish photographer captures starling murmurations” (WBUR.org, June 13, 2022). A photo of starling murmurations from Soren Solkaer’s “Black Sun.”
“If you’re lucky enough to have watched it, it’s a sight you’ll likely never forget: hundreds of thousands of starlings covering the sky, undulating, shifting, forming giant fluid patterns that morph from second to second. The technical name is a murmuration. But in Denmark, where the birds fly above the northern stretches of the Wadden Sea, it’s called the Black Sun. That’s where Danish photographer Soren Solkaer first saw these mysterious patterns as a child — but it wasn’t until more recently that he pointed his camera at the phenomenon, spending the last five years following the birds on their migrations around Europe.”
Notes:
9/13/42. The most spiritual and “beautiful” literature has already been written—in the Bible, in the Greek dramas, in their philosophies. What we have to attain is at best the material representation, a poor substitute for the eternities we cannot logically hope to emulate. Spirituality in our day is as difficult to attain as a pair of wings and a halo.
— Patricia Highsmith, “Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995.″ Anna von Planta (Editor). (Liveright, November 16, 2021)
Photo: DK @ Daybreak. December 20, 2021. 22° F, feels like 16° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
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