Charly recently posted a kestrel pic from his very own home.  I once posted much shittier pics of a falcon on my front lawn.  That wasn’t a kestrel, but I have seen one before, at least once.  We have a different species in the US tho, the american kestrel.  They are smaller, which makes them cuter.  I don’t make the rules.  Sorry europe.

Most days I’m not seeing much nature.  Even when I go out of my way to see nature, it’s usually not much better than what I’d see in the mall parking lot.  The occasion when I saw the kestrel was very different.  I was on a birding trip with my dad and/or my brother; I don’t remember for sure who was there.  Paying more attention to birds than people, and an early leg of the journey had us by these marshy fields in southern Washington state.  They were so full of birds it felt like a strange dream.

Maybe my memory of the occasion is distorted.  By now it’s mostly a memory of a memory.  But in what I do retain, it’s delicious monster salad – creatures everywhere, feasting on nature’s goods.  Herons, egrets, a marsh harrier, surely some geese and ducks I don’t remember, red-winged blackbirds, corvids, and this little bird – sitting on a traffic sign.

There was a photo of a kestrel that did the rounds on social media briefly several years ago, where it was holding a grasshopper like a foot-long sub sandwich.  People wondered after the beast.  Its eyes were so huge, its beak so small, just a cartoon of a bird of prey.  Unlike every hawk or eagle I can think of, male american kestrels have some blue feathers.  Their patterning is very bold, despite being rendered in desaturate primary colors plus black and white.  Incidentally, that’s one of my favorite palettes.  My personal website used to have much the same color selection.

This is the part of the article where I use something about the bird’s name or description as a springboard for talking some unrelated rubbish… no, I won’t be doing that tonight.  I wake up for work in a lil over eight hours.  No way I get a full eight tonight.  I’ll do my best just the same…

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