Mulling things on my morning ramble with Storm, the family’s mixed Lab.
A northern flicker bobbed off as we turned the corner on the extended ramble.
And I wondered about language.
One of the things I try to do in these Rambles with Storm (or should that be Ramble with Storms) is work on descriptions and use of language.
Flickers, not to be confused with Flickr, the photo site, have a very distinctive flight pattern. i call it a bob. I wondered how the flight was described on allaboutbirds.org site by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. So I looked it up and found:
They fly in an up-and-down path using heavy flaps interspersed with glides, like many woodpeckers.
This is one time I think my describing their flight as bobbing is more accurate and more descriptive.
A rabbit gave me another opportunity to fine tune a description. It took off as Storm and I turned on the extended portion of the extended ramble.
Normally rabbits run patterns–hitch, curl or out–like Brandon Marshall and quickly swerve into brush or some other hiding spot. This one, for some reason, opted to go long on a fly pattern and along the edge of the brush, more like Devin Hester. Well, I guess that should be more like Hester used to.
I found it odd. In my younger days, when I more intensely hunted rabbits, old-timers said rabbits would not hole up as fast if it was raining or snowing. They didn’t want to go into the burrow all soaked.
I don’t know if that is true or not, but I do I know this was not a rainy morning. In fact, it was 47 degrees when I got up.
It’s the middle of August and 47 degrees.
Maybe that explains why very few mourning doves were cooing when we set out but all kinds of squirrels were bopping here and there.
Along the shoreline of the north old clay pit, sandpipers flew around. Another shore bird, which looked different than the sandpipers I commonly see at the town pond, took a short flight when I tried to better ID it. Back home, I tried to figure out what it was, but could not come up with any likely IDs.
Near home, two blue jays flew off from the neighbor’s feeder while another squawked down the alley.
