Went Desert Walkabout
Met a bird.
The song of a Lucy’s Warbler may be better than Dawn dish soap and getting out greasy stains.
Headlines and slights. Gaslighting and resentments. The continual eager voices of good and fretful people. Barrage after barrage of self-promotion and hucksterism. Conventional wisdom that is anything but.
Thirty miles or so of desert paths, many at edges of the day. Dawn and dusk.
Sometimes the best a person can do is step out of the fray.
Stop talking. Watch everything. Make quiet notes.
Speak softly to the birds you meet. Whisper thank you.
Step carefully around the cactus.
Reacquaint yourself with silence.
Sit still a while and just listen.
I met a bird in the desert. Met several, actually.
A ‘lifer,’ for me.
So elegant. So understated…
Lucy’s.
The mesquite warbler.
The desert warbler.
Friendly, cavity-nesting warbler; one of only two*.
Singing, desert ghost.
Back home.
More from the desert, soon…
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Lucys_Warbler/overview
*(the other is the Prothonotary Warbler of the North American Southeast)
A “lifer” in birding is a bird that a person has successfully sighted and identified for the very first time in their life. Subsequent sightings of the same bird species by the same birder are no longer counted as lifers. Each new lifer adds to one’s Life List, all of the birds a person has seen so far in their lifetime.
What an adorable little bird. You have a way of creating peace for the rest of us with your words and especially the adjoining pictures. They complete the scene. Thank you David
Big sigh of relief while vicariously traveling with you. You gift your readers with moments of peace and quiet.