birdspot

Walking through the mud of Jamaica Bay for the first time last Sunday, I fell in love a little. I don’t know if there are many people who find wading through pitch black, sulphurous muck to be a romantic adventure, just as I full well know that few would find hours of shorebird watching to be a reliable mechanism for tapping into the sublime, but my heart is still out among those reeds, or perhaps more correctly floating on the Lemna or hanging in the humid air between a lens and a flock of birds, drawing lines in the interstices of small sandpipers flying along East Pond, flashing silver and moving in that awesomely single organism sort of way, or tracing paths in the sweat that runs beneath annoyingly protective clothing. Words are so clumsy for love, and my love is more clumsy than most, and amorphous, indeterminate, always on the cusp of existing, floundering after Calidris wings and the tide.

Bird list/image info: (more…)

Two sketches of a Three-toed Box Turtle (Terrapene carolina triunguis), from Texas.

Hemmed in by concrete and obligation, consumed with frenetic scheduling and multiple projects, I have been focused more on internal dialogues than with my extroverted online life. My words are elsewhere, but are coming around again soon, so I humbly offer you an older image (though a timely species for the season), and sincere gratitude to anyone who stays with me on this blog.

Piping Plover, ink on paper, aprox. 8 x 6″