Birds

One of my favorite stories, as I read years ago, is that of a museum curator who came across a small boy crying at a dinosaur exhibit. The curator, thinking the boy is crying out of fear of the dinosaurs on display, asked him if the dinosaurs scared him. The boy answered ‘No’. When questioned why he was crying, the boy explained that he was crying because the dinosaurs were all dead. The curator then took the boy to the pterodactyl exhibit, and explained the dinosaurs weren’t all dead, and that they were still among us as birds. The boy, happy with the answer left with, I hope, a renewed fascination with the natural world.

I’ve been drawn to nature since a child. And birds, the evolutionary progeny of dinosaurs, have always been a source of fascination (other than the irritating spring warbler migration, where proper identification has been a constant source of frustration for 45 years).

I have thousands of bird photos in my catalog (most of them are not good). Within my online bird collection, I combine Midwest songbirds local to my home in the Ozarks along with tropical birds as encountered in my travels. A trick of bird photography that I judge the quality of the close-up photography is the bird’s eyes. If I can see a reflection, they are in sharp focus.

Finally, can you imagine the ability to travel in three dimensions? To be able to defeat gravity and get out of harm’s way by traveling up, or down? At first it seems very foreign, but when you think of the insects, birds, and fish, I am certain those of us who suffer from Gravity Interruptus are among the minority of life forms on the planet.