Bird Language

I read Anthony Watt's website: Watts Up With That daily. I was suspicious of the Michael Mann's Hockey Stick when it was first published in 1998 having lived through the great coming ice age scare of the '70's. Anthony runs his website as a group blog with various people posting. One poster is Willis Eschenbach who has posted some wonderful articles on climate trends and what is going on behind them. Well worth reading. Yesterday, he posted Between The Warm And The Wild which leads off with the following:

People have been encouraging me to write a book of my experiences, and so I�ve chosen to do so in bits and pieces. We�ve been discussing the vagaries of those astonishing emergent phenomena known as wild animals, so let me continue the theme.

When I was a kid on the cattle ranch my stepdaddy worked in the surrounding forest as what�s called a �timber feller�. The fellers actually fell the trees, they are the aristocracy of the logging crew, and by all accounts he was a good one. One of the things he was best at was finding baby animals whose parents had been killed and bringing them home for us kids to raise. At various times we had a baby horned owl named Dr. Seuss, a baby flying squirrel that could really fly, and of all things, a tiny baby skunk. Named The Skunk. We also had a dog named Puppy until it died of old age, and a cat named Kitty. The Skunk was always and ever just called �The Skunk�, in capital letters like that.

Today, he hits it out of the park with Bird Language:

One fine day, after exhausting my meager means and concluding that my hopes of being struck by financial lightning were as ungrounded as Ben Frankin�s kite, I found myself yielding to exigency.

�Exigency�, as far as I can tell, is from a Latin word meaning �out of money again�. So for exigent reasons, I hired out to work as a cowboy on a cattle ranch up near the California-Oregon border. Caught a ride with the boss out to the spread, put my gear in the bunkhouse, and went to work. I was eighteen.

A wonderful lyrical story -- a prose poem. Go and read. Whatever your views on the climate are, your life will be made better by these essays...