I don’t remember this well enough to be 100% on which egret I saw, but it was a cool encounter.  The kind of moment that makes you wish memory was a stronger thing.  It was in San Francisco which on cursory googling narrows it down to snowy or great egret, and it was a small bird.  Can’t remember the beak or leg color, which would be a better tell.

It was a blustery overcast day with random shafts of sun, and who knows why but we were the only people in the entire San Francisco zoo.  Maybe my brother could explain that; he was a regular at that time.  We walked the artificially twisty paths, in and out of areas with short trees.  We saw an interspecies lemur cuddle pile which was very cute, but the best thing was that the free birds – the ones that weren’t even part of an exhibit – were cool characters that I do not get to see in WA state.  Or can only see in glimpses at a distance.

There was a belted kingfisher just sitting on a branch, close enough to get a good look.  I haven’t been within fifty feet of one in the PNW.  Cooler still, there was a perfect and beautiful little white bird wading in a fountain, looking to my eyes like a pet-sized origami crane.  It had been eating frogs or koi, I don’t know, and didn’t appreciate our company.  Lucky us, that meant we could watch it fly away, see the whole beautiful mechanics of its body in motion.

Man I wish I could remember that shit better.  Human frailty sucks.

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My favorite encounters with dinosaurs are the ones that are incidental to my life.  I was just out doing something else, and there they were.  But still, expeditions specifically meant for birding can be very productive and a good time in their own right, if you don’t fuck yourself up doing them.  I haven’t been on a ton of these trips, so I sound like a broken record when I recommend the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.  The paths will keep you from twisting your ankle like you would on an undeveloped hillside or a rocky beach.  I dearly hope orngdolf shitler and apartheid junior haven’t fucked it up too much yet.

My brother was living in Kansas and every time we went out was a chance for me to see something I can’t see where I live.  But he wanted to see things that were new to him as well, so he’d take me to some odd spots.  I don’t remember where this one was, but I remember the tableau.  We were on a path, might have been paved, like a regular walking park for dogs and joggers.  Down a grassy hill there was some kind of water out of sight, and a very small tree sitting alone just on the visible side of that crest.  Sitting in the tree was a single bird, maybe robin sized?  Dark on top, white on bottom.

Absolutely unexciting, uninteresting.  It did nothing interesting and made no interesting sounds.  I pointed it out and my brother said it was new to him as well.  Not too hard to ID, looking at passerines in the area for something with the right colors.  Eastern kingbird.  Woohoo.

What exactly is the point of paying this much attention to little creatures?  Sometimes, if you put your findings into publicly available data sets, it can be citizen science.  Sometimes, you may see something you didn’t know was there before, and be filled with a sense of wonder at nature.  Sometimes, I dunno, it’s just not that thrilling.

I have been posting these without googling the animals, trying to go off memory alone because it can be more fun that way.  I might make an ass out of myself, but I give readers a chance to siwoti at me for their own amusement.  But I caved on kingbirds.  I read the wiki, trying to find any connection to anything interesting.  Zilch!

They are part of a clade of passerines that is absolutely massive, the most speciose in the americas – tho much more variety below the US.  I skimmed those birds and had not heard of any of them.  Some looked like birds I knew but only because of convergent evolution; they were not the same guys.  What are kingbirds all about?  What do they do?  I dunno.  Eat a bug.  Have a nice day.

Even a drab and conventional bird can be a person’s fave if they have personal experience with them.  If you love eastern kingbirds, holler in the comments.

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I don’t get mockingbirds where I live, so this is, once again, a bird I saw on vacation.  In Kansas.  I’m glad my brother finally moved away from that state, but I imagine the birdwatching might be slightly better there than at his new place in Chicago.  Not sure tho, I have yet to visit.  All I’ve ever seen of Chicago is the airport, whose bathroom stall dividers went all the way to the floor to keep closeted gays from hooking up, were made from aluminum to reduce odds of someone drilling a glory hole.

Birds!  Kansas.  We were trying to find some kind of bird I don’t even remember, and found mockingbirds instead, near a random elementary school – so we didn’t want to hang around for long, ugh.  But they were amazing.  I had no idea they had the big trailing tail feathers and remarkable dark grey and white patterning, mostly visible in flight.  Prettier than I expected.  I didn’t get to hear any notable calls, don’t remember what they sounded like.

You ever hear them do the mimicry for which they are named?  I presume.  For all I know they are just called mockingbirds because their default call sounds like they’re making fun of you.

That’s it tho, the only time I’ve seen them.  So I must blow up the word count with a lil’ more.  There’s the nursery rhyme.  “Hush little baby don’t say a word, mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…”  Was that the song the first possession victim in the first Evil Dead movie sang?  I’m sure it’s been used like that a lot.  The Munsters lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, right?  Does that mean mockingbirds have a spooky association?  Are they psychopomps, winging souls to the underworld?

Munsters were a knockoff Addams Family, and I feels like Addams Family were a knockoff of something Ray Bradbury created in like 47 Anno Domini.  Spookhouse families.  Hey, they could coexist.  I wonder how much Addams/Munsters crossover fic there is.  In real life, spookhouse families are few and far between.  Who likes Halloween the mostiest?  I’m reminded of this pic that sometimes does the rounds, a family photo of a goth mom and dad, with a goth daughter and a randomly sunny-looking son.  I believe he was wearing a blue sweater, like a blue jay adopted by a family of crows.

Spookhouse families can be cool, but sometimes they are very much not cool.  The most halloween’d out house I randomly passed last year was also ultra-maga.  Eww.  Nazis shouldn’t be allowed  to be spoopy.  I revoke their spoop privileges.

I suspect the spookiest people are not breeders, and therefore cannot manifest a spookhouse proper.  It’s the province of gay uncles, and other sundry LGBTetc family members.  One day, may our condominium live up to this promise..

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The famous american blue jay.  Iconic bird, famous.  Star of cartoon network’s Regular Show.  Mascot of Toronto stickball.  Festive blue and white raiment with an artful dash of black stripes, white face with black dot eyes for Hello Kitty points.  Unfuckwithable.

And indeed, I’ve never really seen them.  I’ve glimpsed them briefly at a distance, only able to tell what they were by context, and by my brother calling out when he saw them.  I get the impression our california scrub jays are less shy.  After all, I’ve seen them on my lawn and the roof of our carport.  I spent a combined total of a few weeks in Kansas and only saw the more famous jays flitting around trees and hiding the second my brother spoke.

So technically, yes, there are on my life list.  But I’m not personally familiar with them.  Talking about jays more broadly, they’re the more graceful, slightly smaller cousins of the crow family, with similarly harsh calls and opportunistic habits.  They’re often blue.  It’s a… oh what was the term… poly-somethin’… polyphyletic.  It’s an artificial grouping like “fish,” not a category describing a natural grouping based on common descent.  As I discovered while looking at info about canada jays, some are more closely related to magpies.  And magpies aren’t even a natural grouping!  Whatever.

I’d talk about Canadian stickball but I don’t know a thing about it.  How about Regular Show?  That was a cartoon on the TBS-owned cartoon network, about a blue jay and a raccoon that work incompetently for a city park?  If I remember correctly.  Mordecai and Rigby were their names.  They got up to hijinks that would not be terribly out of place in a 1980s comedy movie, but leaning more into the unreality possible in drawn media.

They also had relationship problems, which is weird for a kid’s show, right?  The raccoon was dating a beaver and the blue jay was dating a red and white bird that was shaped like blue jays are shaped in that universe.  Does that make her a red jay?  Is there such an animal?  Googled, seems it’s an occasional name for Cardinals.  Nonsense!  I refuse.

Anyway, the blue jay breaks up with the red jay and dates a storm cloud for a while.  I don’t know if that show was at all watchable for ten year olds, but it worked OK for me circa age forty, watching basic cable while I cooked, back at the old apartment.

That’s all.  I’m done.

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This is going to have a lot of bullshit and filler because the fact is, I’ve never had a view of a Baltimore oriole that was worth a shit.  On a last-minute birding drive with my brother, we hit up a scratchy sun-blasted park where some big cool owls had been seen.  In our allotted time there, we did not see those, but I did glimpse these black and orange birds shying away, high in a tree, colors much less impressive in yellow sunlight than they would have been in more neutral circumstances.

I did another one of these posts about the varied thrush – another orange and black bird, that actually lives in my area.  I like their overall look better than orioles, which could be cause for regional pride, but comparing the two in photographs, I realized our local birds are much more drab.  Because fucking of course they are.  PNW is drabland, safe for even the sparkliest of vampires.

So, another famous North American bird only glimpsed in passing at a distance.  What can one say about that?  Remember those educational products they sold to parents in the ’80s?  The green plastic box with postcards of unusual animals inside, with information about them on the reverse sides?  I had one of those with an oriole in it.  Much less memorable than the cuscus.

I used to be semi-aware of baseball cards as a thing to do, which made me semi-aware of the stickball team from Baltimore.  Hey, I’ll tell you everything I know about Baltimore.

You ever see the movie Long Kiss Goodnight?  God, it’s such a great entry to the genre of bullshitty action cinema.  Easily as good as Die Hard, though more self-aware and maybe too elaborate to be quite as iconic?  Any given Samuel Jackson quote from that movie ranks up there with his dialogue from Pulp Fiction, or better.  Geena Davis was perfect.  It might be the best cinematic use of her talents ever, as good as she was in Beetlejuice and A League of Their Own.  And hell, the Orion-bankrupting Cutthroat Island.

That’s all over the place.  Forget the digression.  Important thing, her character was named Charlie Baltimore.  She was so cool a rap lady took the name, altered to Charli Baltimore.  I wonder if she was repping Balti?  For my money the most hilarious moment in LKG was when she got in a car wreck with a stag, and while it lay dying, she did the action movie neck snap to put it out of its misery.  She action movie neck snapped a specimen of motherfucking megafauna.  Hahahahahha!

What else?  Internet funnyman Brian David Gilbert is from Baltimore and shows some civic pride in his series of Dances Moving comedy shorts.  His partner and collaborator Karen Han reminds me too much of the first girl I remember crushing on, haha.  Hoo.  Forget I said that.

Baltimore has, from my point of view across a continent, some fun quirky cultural things to it.  Old Bay Seasoning.  A wacky coat of arms.  One of those East Coast local accents that we don’t get out here…

Anyway, Baltimore.  And some shy little binch of a bird hiding from me in a tree in a hot-ass place I don’t ever want to be again for the rest of my natural life.  Kansas.  I’d rather go to Baltimore.  Living a thousand miles from the ocean is just fucked up.

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