This month I saw many birds for the first time on a trip to Semuliki National Park, so choosing the artist's choice wasn't easy. I finally just went with the most recent lifer, the White-spotted Flufftail. Unlike the experience outlined in the video above, my sighting was completely unsought. The bird just walked in front of me on the path. It was beautiful, with its deep red color and its spotted sweater. It was my first flufftail, and the place that shows on my life list is: "Semuliki National Park -- Red Monkey and Hot Springs Trails," so that is obviously also enormously cool. And it was even more exciting that I had seen this guy once I started learning about how secretive they are and how hard it often is to observe one.
Sometimes you look everywhere for joy.
You try to forget what makes you sad,
focus on the good,
and yet although the world is full of a number of things,
you're gloomy.
And then one day it just appears in front of you,
when you aren't particularly looking,
right there in the path ahead,
red and white and black
like a White-spotted Flufftail.
It's hustling on by,
and you can't hold onto it,
but somehow seeing it there is enough.
It keeps you going.
I've been reading a novel partially set in Antarctica, so I was excited to meet the Snow Petrel, one of three birds that has been seen at the South Pole. They are white all over except for their black eyes and bill, and their grayish feet, so they fit right in where they live, blending in with the ice and snow.
Birds of ice and snow
Born in hard, cold pebbly nests
Dancing at world's end
Day 14: Victoria Crowned-Pigeon
Day 16: Blue-capped Cordonbleu
Day 17: Andean Cock-of-the-Rock
Day 21: Wilson's Bird-of-Paradise
Day 29: Ribbon-tailed Astrapia
I'll put up links to all 31 posts for next Poetry Friday.
Jone is hosting Poetry Friday today.
Long white ribbon tail
Bright green bird of paradise
No wonder he preens
©Ruth Bowen Hersey
Bearded Vulture
Eating bones is
Their food culture
Dropping bones
From way up high
They break when they fall
From the sky
These birds eat
What others kill
Yet many people
Fear them still
©Ruth Bowen Hersey
Black Stilts in New Zealand
are barely hanging on,
with stoats and weasels,
ferrets and hedgehogs,
wildcats
all threatening their chicks.
Black Stilts in New Zealand
are top priority for protection
and they are even
Take it easy,
Kakis.
I think that you can make it after all.
©Ruth Bowen Hersey
In The Bird Name Book, Susan Myers quotes the ornithologist Tom Iredale writing in 1924. He called fairy-wrens "whiffs of beauty." "Whiff is descriptive of their flight across a path, as with their long tail they fly undulating and zigzagly as if wafted by a gnome-driven wind, disappearing into the thicket, leaving an impression of dainty fairyness." Whiffs? Zigzagly? Fairyness? Clearly there's something about these little birds.
Words fail me, little fairywren
To describe your beauty,
Your undulating fairyness:
You really are a cutie.
Your whiffs of blue, your fine tail too,
Your zigzagged undulating
Words fail me, little fairywren:
A beauty past relating.
©Ruth Bowen Hersey
Singing from the top of a termite mound
Red-and-yellow Barbet makes a musical sound
Brightly colored, polka-dotted
Red-and-yellow Barbet, you've been spotted!
©Ruth Bowen Hersey
Amazon stinkbird
Orange crest, red eyes, blue face
Hissing and grunting
©Ruth Bowen Hersey
