Today is my mom's birthday, so in her honor I'm posting my first-ever bird picture.* She is a bird-lover extraordinaire: she knows more kinds of birds -and their calls, feeding habits, and juvenile and mating plumages - than I know flavors of ice cream, and that's saying something. When we take walks together in the woods, I like to surge ahead, but Mom likes to pause every few paces because she wants to look more closely at a flash of feathers that was invisible to my merely ordinary (or impatient) eye. Mom also volunteers weekly at a wild bird hospital in my hometown. I love to talk to her after her shift because she regales me with stories of grumpy bald eagles with eagle pox (did you even know there was such a thing?) or tiny saw-whet owls with their yellow egg-yolk eyes. Lately she has been spending extra time at the hospital taking care of a flock of pelicans who, confused by the balmy autumn, didn't migrate in time and were stranded when the weather turned inhospitable. By the time the pelicans have been rehabilitated and released, it will be baby-bird season, and you'll find her leaning over a row of incubators while nestfuls of gaping golden mouths vie for her attention. They need not worry; like the good mom she is, she'll leave these little nestlings full of love and good food.
*Well, technically, this is the second shot of the first bird I've tried to photograph.
1 comment:
Happy Birthday, indeed! My mom was a bird-lover, too. I hope that's what my kids say when they send me birthday wishes.
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