From c95832bbc647e2e4a544d8d1d9fe90539c3d372e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: luxagraf Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2018 09:44:46 -0600 Subject: added dialogues to backup dialogues --- dialogues/american-redstart.txt | 9 +++++++++ dialogues/barredowl.txt | 11 +++++++++++ dialogues/bobolink.txt | 9 +++++++++ dialogues/scarlet-tanager.txt | 3 +++ dialogues/summer-tanager.txt | 7 +++++++ dialogues/thrasher.txt | 9 +++++++++ dialogues/yellow-warbler.txt | 5 +++++ 7 files changed, 53 insertions(+) create mode 100644 dialogues/american-redstart.txt create mode 100644 dialogues/barredowl.txt create mode 100644 dialogues/bobolink.txt create mode 100644 dialogues/scarlet-tanager.txt create mode 100644 dialogues/summer-tanager.txt create mode 100644 dialogues/thrasher.txt create mode 100644 dialogues/yellow-warbler.txt (limited to 'dialogues') diff --git a/dialogues/american-redstart.txt b/dialogues/american-redstart.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bc764ba --- /dev/null +++ b/dialogues/american-redstart.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ + + +American redstart is one of those head scratching names. For whatever reason, it's not called a warbler. Nevertheless, despite the name, it is a warbler, not, as the name would lead you to expect, a relative of old world redstarts. In fact, it has nothing whatsoever to do with old world redstarts. Not the only poorly named bird to be sure -- a red breasted woodpecker does not have a red breast, magnolia warblers almost never go near magnolia trees, etc, etc. + + + +Redstarts are fun birds to watch. They love to flutter, tail spread, wings seemingly in slow motion, they hover and chase after insects. They almost look more like oversized butterflies than birds. Even the coloring is reminiscent of a monarch. They tend to move more like flycatchers than warblers, which tend to hop and bounce around, rather than flutter and hover like redstarts. + + diff --git a/dialogues/barredowl.txt b/dialogues/barredowl.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1a1cb9a --- /dev/null +++ b/dialogues/barredowl.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +The owl came so fast and so big my brain couldn't put together a coherent thought about it until it was already well past me. But I did manage to follow the gray streak into the thicket of tangled beech and oak limbs and then, there it was, staring back at me with a look of indignation on its face. + +My eyes were so bleary I could hardly focus on it. There was no way I could identify it at first, the only thing I could see were it's huge eyes, and it's massiveness. I tried to focus and see if there were ear tuffs, but there were not. The only thing I could think of that was anywhere near a great horned owl's size and lived in this area was a Barred Owl. + +It was huge and gray, grayer than a Barred Owl should be, but then it was early morning, the light was bad and my eyes bleary. + +I'd only been awake about 4 minutes. I hadn't had so much as a sip of coffee and wasn't actually birding even, I was driving to do some birding when the birds started for me. I watched the owl for about five minutes, it watched me for the same. I've never had a bird return my gaze with so knowing a stare. It wasn't unpleasant, it felt curious in an offhand, vaguely irritated way. But it most definitely stared back the whole time. + +After a while a truck pulling a fishing boat topped the hill and the owl dove off the branch, flapped it's massive wings once and somehow glided expertly through the tangle of tree limbs until it disappeared deeper into the woods. I continued to watch the tree. I didn't even acknowledge the truck as it went by -- other people with the temerity to exist while I'm trying to stare down an owl don't get acknowledged. + +I climbed back in the car. As I drove off toward the meadow I was hoping would hold larks and prairie chickens and grouse, I started thinking about all the other owls that must have seen me over the past 18 months of living out in the woods, all the others that sat silent and watched me and I never knew it. Owls as largely invisible to us, writes ornithologist and writer Bernd Heinrich, talking about a barred owl he once studied. What Heinrich doesn't address is that we're not invisible to them. They're out there, watching everything, and every now and then you get to watch them back. diff --git a/dialogues/bobolink.txt b/dialogues/bobolink.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3e3cf8f --- /dev/null +++ b/dialogues/bobolink.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +The one and only time I have seen a bobolink was on the Bobolink Trail at Harrington State Park in Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan. The trail went back, away from the lake, back up a hill through a grassy meadow that overlooked some pastures and fields that eventually stretched out to the sort of postcard-perfect farmland pastorals that Wisconsin has in spade in the summer time. + +There were plenty of red-winged blackbirds wheeling about over the fields, but for the first mile or so I did not see any sign of the eponymous birds. And then I caught a flash of black and white whipping by the corner of my eye as I was watching the blackbirds. Then came the curious the bubbling, tinkling sound that, to someone anyway, sounds like the bird is saying "bobolink". It sounded like nothing of the sort to me, but then most bird names make no sense anymore (however much sense they might have made when they were bestowed). + +I moved up the trail a bit and discovered a pair of bobolinks fluttering about in the tall grass restoration area, favoring, it seemed anyway, the taller, thicker stalks of plant that were capable of holding their weight without teetering in the breeze. I couldn't tell what they were eating, but they were busy hunting something in the grass below, insects I assume. There were only the two, which, according to Sibley, means they were probably nesting, otherwise they would likely have been in a flock. + +The male is unmistakable, the yellow on the back of its head is so unusual it's almost disconcerting. It looks almost like it's missing half its head and you're staring at its brain. It's a strange color pattern anyway. I'm not aware of any other bird with a two-tone head divided in the same place, regardless of color. + +I was birding with family in this case, so after staring long enough to be sure of what I had seen, one of the kids dragged me along, leaving the bobolinks and their strange yellow heads behind. Despite crossing many a pastoral, prairie grass field in our travels through Wisconsin and Michigan, I have never seen another bobolink. diff --git a/dialogues/scarlet-tanager.txt b/dialogues/scarlet-tanager.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..504a3cf --- /dev/null +++ b/dialogues/scarlet-tanager.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +We had a couple camps in Tennessee where Summer Tanagers were regular visitors, chirping away in the woods even if we couldn't see them. One day I was sitting outside, drinking coffee and trying to work, but really watching birds a bit more than working. I saw a red streak up in a tree. I'd been watching the Summer tanagers for days, I almost didn't grab my binoculars to look, but I'm a birder, no bird is every boring, so I did. And you know what? It was a Summer Tanager with black wings. Wait, that's not right. Not a Summer Tanager. A Scarlet Tanager, probably the most singularly striking bird I've ever seen. + +Not only did I get a new bird, but it was a good reminder from nature -- never assume, never make the mistake of thinking the world is what you think it is. It is, independent of you, though you are part of it. Pay attention and it will show itself. diff --git a/dialogues/summer-tanager.txt b/dialogues/summer-tanager.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..522968a --- /dev/null +++ b/dialogues/summer-tanager.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ +Birding will make you a believer of patterns. It will teach you that there is no such thing as coincidence, just patterns you can't discern. There's a difference. For example, you go your whole life without seeing a bird, and then suddenly, you're in the right place at the right time and there it is. That in an of itself is remarkable and satisfying, but often that's not the end of the story, often that's just the point at which you step into some pattern that begins to repeat. Often, the next thing you know, you see that bird everywhere you go. That was my experience with the Summer Tanager. + +I was sitting out one evening at Watson Mill State Park when I heard a call I didn't recognize. It was already well into twilight and I had put away my binoculars for the day, but I went back inside the bus and grabbed them. I scanned the trees a bit and tried the walk toward the sound, but I didn't see anything. I kept walking up a little rise toward a big pine that was off by itself. + +Out of the corner of my eye I saw a red streak flash by. I dismissed it as a Cardinal, but then some pattern recognizing part of my brains said no, that's not quite right. So I tracked it and brought the binoculars to my eyes and sure enough, not a Cardinal, a Summer Tanager. It moved through pretty quickly, but I got a good enough look to identify it. Despite it being spring I did not see a female with it. + +Two night later we were several hundred miles west and north, at a campground on the Natchez Trace when I saw another flash of red that wasn't quite Cardinal like and once again it turned out to be a Summer Tanager. This time though there was a female around too. They chattered in the wood right around our camp, the kids got to see them. Later that night Corrinne and I were sitting by the fire when it flew right up into the tree above the fire and watched us for a good five minutes, seemingly impervious to the smoke rise up past it. It was watching the female gather twigs on the ground behind us, if we registered at all in its world we didn't mean much to it. diff --git a/dialogues/thrasher.txt b/dialogues/thrasher.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d77ebc9 --- /dev/null +++ b/dialogues/thrasher.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Most birders want to see the exotic, the magnificent. I'm not different. I want to see a painted bunting. I want to see a Trogan. A Quetzal, a Lady Gouldian Finch, a bee-eater, and all the rest of the world's insanely colorful birds. But I also love the more familiar birds, the birds I see all the time. I like to say hello to them, to ask them how they are. I don't understand a word of what they say, but I like the sound and I assume they can't understand a word I say either, but perhaps they like the sound. Or maybe they think *what is that weirdo barking at me about*? + +The brown thrasher isn't necessarily a looker, but they sure can sing when they're in the mood. I sat out one evening behind the bus listening to a brown thrasher sing for the better part of an hour. I'm pretty sure that in that time it never completely repeated a phrase of its song. + +Some of the time I watched it through binoculars, studying at the way the short brown and white featherers around its throat rise and fall with the melody line it sang. The bird sat at the very tip of a dead branch a couple of meters up, not far from my head. Every now and then he would stop and focus his beady black eye to regard me with a look that implied some suspicion, what was I up to? Had I paid my ticket to hear the show? + +It was the first day we were back in Georgia. Fifteen months of travel and we were right back where we started in a deciduous forest, mixed oak, beech, pecan and other hardwoods with clumps of pines here and there. Just beyond the campground there was a small reservoir, perfect habitat for red headed woodpeckers, one of my favorite birds. But it was not the woodpeckers that ended up impressing me that evening, it was the Brown Thrasher. + +The kids had a hard time falling asleep that night. It was our first long driving day in well over a month and they had not had a chance to get their energy out. In between getting glasses of water and patting backs to get them to sleep, I sat outside and listened to the thrasher. Occasionally he'd be joined by a nearby Carolina Warbler, but nothing, not even the cawing of crows or the short, sharp chip of cardinals, seemed to deter or influence his song in any way. Olivia asked me at one point, what are all those birds singing? Not birds I said, bird. One thrasher singing away until the light faded and it roosted down for the night. diff --git a/dialogues/yellow-warbler.txt b/dialogues/yellow-warbler.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1148b0f --- /dev/null +++ b/dialogues/yellow-warbler.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +Every campsite we stay in tends to have one or two species in abundance, birds that are around all day, regularly, and then the rest of the species tend to be passing through, sometimes very regularly, where we're camped as I type this there's a pair of black-throated green warblers that stop by every morning and evening at almost precisely 7AM and 7PM. At our campsite at Harrington Beach State Park the two regulars were yellow warblers and cedar waxwings. + +The yellow warblers were heard more than seen, though I did see them a good bit. Unlike most warblers the yellows would sit still long enough for me to photograph them (I have only manual focus lenses so fidgety, hoppy birds like warblers are generally impossible for me to photograph). All day every day though they were in the bushes singing. According to my Audubon guide it's usually easy to find the nests. I did not look for any, though I have no doubt they were around if for no other reason than there was an abundance of cowbirds around and yellow warbler nests are a favorite of cowbirds. + +Still it's the song that sticks out to me with the yellow warbler, the melodic, high-pitched, *sweet-sweet-sweet, sweeter-than-sweet* at all hours of the day and, up here, where it doesn't get dark until 11PM right now, well into what I could call night. -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2