Awesome. Reminds me of the guy(?) who likes to perch on the fire escape outside my office window. (I know nothing about birds, they might be totally different species or something.)
Did your friend have to muss up the bird?
Its parents were yelling from a tree overhead -- the authorities told him to leave it alone and the parents would cope.
Oh damn. Buck just called to check for an update and a raccoon killed it. This is no longer a cheerful happy post. Maybe I'll unpublish it.
That is sad. Hopefully they will have another egg next year.
Alternately, you could delete all the comments after 6, close off further comments, and those of us lame enough to have been checking Unfogged on a Saturday afternoon could swear to never reveal the gruesome ending.
7: Can't we be happy for the raccoon?
I bet the squirrels are laughing.
Squirrels are always laughing, the little fuckers. They think everything's a joke.
It's possible I over identify with my dog.
Now I'm just sad, but before I read 7 I was going to mention that the greatest sign in human history I have ever seen warned, re: a nesting area, "Hawks Attacking Humans."
6: Is that something endangered or do your friends call the authorities for every little thing?
16: Migratory birds* are illegal to (simplistically) touch.
Sad ending to the story. I would have expected the parents to better defend the fledgling against a raccoon (in day time too?)
*exceptions for things like blackbirds
17: Severely illegal, as I recall, with jail terms and multi-thousand-dollar fines for scofflaws. (Note: I advocate public flogging for the assholes who shoot, trap and mutilate eagles, so I endorse such severity.)
14 was me, though I have no idea why my name didn't attach.
11 Squirrels are evil. Kill them all.
18: Then someone should call the cops on those raccoons.
Unless the raccoons touched the birds in a non-simplistic way, I suppose.
If that was the kind of bird that kills rodents and/or pigeons, I am sorry it didn't make it. I don't know birds well. If not for the title, I'd have thought it a sparrow or something.
10 made me laugh and now I hate myself.
Great title. Loved that little guy. Sad outcome.
That was a splendid little bird. Nature, red, etc.
||Fuck Milosz. I'm trying my hand again at translating Treatise on Poetry (a long lyrical poem - very beautiful) and it's frustratingly difficult. I've been doing this off and on for a couple years. It's just for my own amusement and to get the greater appreciation for the language that comes with trying to translate something, but Czeszku, why do you have to make life so difficult.>|
Be simple my native tongue
So that all who see a word
See apple trees, the river, the turn in the road,
As they are in the flash of a summer storm
But language cannot be mere image
And nothing more. She has always been tempted
By rhythm's music, dream and melody.
Defenseless against the harsh passing world
Today many ask what does it mean
This shame upon reading a book of verse
As if the author addressed one's darker side
Setting aside and tricking minds
With a pinch of humour, jest, satire
Poetry may yet be liked
It's greatness is then appreciated
But when the stakes are life itself
The battle is joined in prose. It was not always thus.
And the loss is unacknowledged
Romances, tractates serve, and don't endure
For one good line weighs more
Than the weight of many carefully crafted pages
Yes, exactly, one good line. Only how to render Milosz' meticulously crafted lines of Polish into an English that conveys not just meaning and image, but also the rhythm beauty and... weight?
.
Carriages dozed by St. Mary's tower.
Tiny Cracow like a paper wrapped egg
Taken out of the dye pot for Easter.
And the poets walked in their raincoats
Nobody today remembers their names.
But their hands were real,
Cufflinks, cuffs above the table.
The Ober carrying over coffee and the day's paper
Till he passed like them, nameless.
Muses, Rachels in trailing shawls
Moistened lips, pinning their braids
The brooch lies with the ashes of their daughters
Or in the garret by the soundless dome and
Glass lily. Angels of secession
In the dark toilets of parental homes
Pondering the connection of sex and soul,
Lying in Vienna,. sorrows and migraines
(Assoc. Prof. Freud, is of Galician decent, I hear).
[...]
The long haired Muse learns to read
In the dark commodes of parental homes
And knows from thereon what poetry isn't.
For it is but the emotion and inspiration
Which lives in the three dots by the comma.
It flows, rocks untranslatably ,
Ersatz prayer. And so it will remain.
Simple composition will be forbidden.
"Bah, punditry. Let it speak in prose".
Until one day, in the schools of the new avant-garde,
They'll cry Eureka at the ancient ban.
I would think a genuine chicken hawk could take a raccoon.
Animals!
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the greatest perfomance in sports history. The three times still stand as records.
I still tear-up every time I watch the video
With no other horse in view, that crazy motherfucker was still accelerating at the wire. Way way beyond competition, and not something a jockey could inspire.
to any representative of any of his employees who are employed in an industry affecting commerce