Birdy day

Today while CZ went to her classes, I went to Central Park's North End to look for warblers.  This time I saw lots of them in only an hour. Sometimes, when I go birding for hours and rarely see a migrant, I am tempted to think maybe I'm wasting my time. Shouldn't I be inside getting something done, or at least being sociable? But when I have a day like this, outside, listening to buzzy trills and seeing bright colors flit around, I remember what it is that I like about watching birds. It's an almost indefinable combination of beauty, detailed observation, and making educated guesses about where and when the birds will appear, but without really having control of the outcome.  

Before I make my list, I'll mention some highlights.  The most obvious one was a Scarlet Tanager.  In the spring, the males are a bright, tropical-looking red, with black wings.  This one popped out vividly against the green foliage, and seeming to realize it, he moved to the other side of the tree when he saw me.  Then he'd emerge into the open, spy me again, and repeat the retreat.  This went on for some time, so I really got to see him well.  

Magnolia Warblers were everywhere!  I've never seen so many that I stopped counting before, but that's what happened today.  And they were singing, too, which made them easy to find.  It's always interesting when you can watch a bird through binoculars while it's actually singing.  

I saw not one, but three Ovenbirds.  Ovenbirds are funny little brown warblers, like small thrushes with orange caps, that walk around on the ground near streams and logs.  When anyone in our family mentions an Ovenbird, one of the others of us inevitably comments, "Walks like a chicken."  You'd think we were eating frog legs, it's so predictable. 

I saw a 4" Winter Wren flush both a Robin and a Magnolia Warbler out of a clump of violets.  It must have been crowded in there!  Wrens are tiny, but fierce.  Even their song is feisty.

My favorite sighting of the day was a glimpse of gray-blue hood and white eye-ring, with some yellow underneath.  This fits the description of about three warblers, all pretty uncommon, but I only got one glimpse, and only of its head and neck.  So I stood there waiting to see if the bird would come out into the open again. It didn't show, but it did sing a few times, with a series of four ascending warbles and then four quick, quiet pips.  I heard it fly to another tree, repeat the song once, and then it disappeared altogether.

I did everything I could to memorize that song, through the sounds of other bird calls on the back through the park, during ten minutes I spent talking to a friend at the edge of the park, and through the usual panoply of Upper West Side noises as I walked home, including some loud salsa music with a sticky, repetitive tune.  When I got home, I checked Cornell's bird identification site, pulling up every warbler with a blue hood, to no avail--Connecticut, Mourning, and beyond all hope, McGillivray's? (No, of course not!) Then I remembered one more: The Nashville.  And there it was, a variation, but unmistakably the same song I'd heard.  

There were even some birds I couldn't identify today, which was fun.  Likely they were juveniles or females of migrating species.  These promise new challenges, and besides, they help me to imagine that there is still mysterious and uncharted territory ahead in birding.  

Not in taxonomic order:

Magnolia Warbler
Ovenbird
Parula
Black-throated Blue Warbler
Yellow Warbler
Common Yellowthroat (male and female)
Nashville Warbler
Black-and-White Warbler
Redstart (yellow)
Baltimore Oriole (juvenile)
Winter Wren
Hermit Thrush
Scarlet Tanager
Catbirds
Cardinals
Blue Jays
Robins


*Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

How I choose what to read next

I can tell this photo of our bookshelf is old, because we have more books now and our framed photos are different.  Isn't it funny how an old photo of a bookshelf is almost like a scrapbook?

I love the moment when I get to pick out a new book.  I do it kinesthetically, by making a stack. Usually I have a mental list, but it changes.  And I usually have more than one book going at a time, so there's a certain undefined number of them that I have to finish in order to allow myself the privilege of making a new stack.

Yesterday was one of those "make the stack" moments, though.  I've finished my biography of Jonathan Edwards, and I finished a nice little light book by Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris) that indulged my eccentricity. So it was just the right moment to wallow in books.

Though my shelving system is eccentric, I usually know where my books are.  First I went to the bedroom to fetch The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  I plan to read this one mostly in the mornings along with my Bible.  

Then I climbed up on one of the chairs and started taking books down off the classical shelf (5C--our shelving system is modeled after our apartment building, with floors and units).  When Bob came into the room, I was standing in my socks on a narrow ledge, holding a volume of Plutarch in one hand and Alfred the Great in the other.  They both made the trip down with me.  They are both of a good subway book size and weight.  

Then I remembered that I'd been meaning to read David McCullough's 1776 for forever.  Someone had given us a deluxe version, a slip-covered coffee-table book with facsimile documents in vellum envelopes.  It's really fun to look through all the documents, but unfortunately, the sheer size of the book has probably kept me from ever seriously trying to read it.  So yesterday I moved it from the shelf to the coffee table, which we didn't even have when I got the book.  

On the way back down to the chair, I spied Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children lying sideways on top of the other books in the "history/mostly source material" shelf (2B), because I'd run out of room on that shelf.  Oh, that too!  I grabbed it.  (Grabbing books while pivoting to step down, in sock feet, from a narrow wooden ledge is not something I'd recommend, but this time I got away with it.)  

So there's my little stack.  I'm in a history mood.  And I also have David Hicks' Norms and Nobility going, but I forgot to include it in the photo above. I'm not sure I'll read every one of the books in the stack, but they're easy to get to now, and I started three of them (Bonhoeffer, Plutarch, and Teddy Roosevelt) today.  They're very different books, for different situations, so I'll likely enjoy all three.  

In addition to the stacks, I have another informal rule for choosing books.  I try, somehow, to loosely rotate lighter books with more challenging ones, and fiction with non-fiction.  Non-fiction usually wins out overall, but I'm trying to balance them more than I once did.  And of course, some days I'll just pick up a cookbook or a reference book and spend a couple of hours perusing that.  

***

So what are the Shakespeare books doing in the photo? Those are Bob's books.  

Bob is a completely different sort of book chooser than I am.  He is very goal-oriented.  He plans out his reading, often down to the number of pages per day, several books in advance, and then works methodically through his own plan.  In addition, he reads every issue of The New Criterion, cover to cover, before the next issue arrives.  He gets through some very difficult books this way, like N.T. Wright's Resurrection of the Son of God, or the Landmark Herodotus.  (He got the idea for reading the latter from The New Criterion, which is a hazard of reading that magazine.)  He got through vet school and law school this way, too.  

Right now he has Shakespeare at the top of his stack, because Shakespeare in the Park season is coming up, and he dutifully assigns himself each play before we go see it.  This year the plays are The Merchant of Venice and The Winter's Tale.  

Will I get around to reading Shakespeare?  I don't know--I am, honestly, a flittier reader than Bob is.  But I get through a lot, I challenge myself, and I bond with my books.  (I have my own system of margin notes and underlining.)  I think we each have each found a method of reading that suits us.

Bird update

Eastern Wood-pewee (from Wikipedia)

Birds last weekend:

Downy Woodpecker
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Scarlet Tanager
Least Flycatcher
Black-and-white Warbler
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Yellow Warbler
Black-throated Green Warbler
And the usual suspects

This weekend:

Eastern Wood-Pewee
Blackpoll Warbler
Yellow-Rumped Warbler
and what I think was a partially-molted Indigo Bunting, but I didn't get a good enough look

I haven't seen as many birds as usual this year.  I think that's mostly because I haven't been to Central Park, but instead have been walking home through Riverside Park after meeting CZ for lunch on Saturdays. I haven't really had time to wander aimlessly yet.  

Usually even Riverside Park has more warblers, though.  Well, the season is only about halfway through.  And I'm always happy to see a Scarlet Tanager!

Shostakovich chamber performance

Here's a link to CZ's chamber performance of the first movement of Shostakovich piano trio (No. 67) last weekend. This link comes with a lot of caveats, including:

• The link will take you, at least on my computer, to a screen with a media player, since Blogger doesn't have a player of its own.

• I cut out the cello harmonics which comprise the first part of the piece. That's because they are incredibly difficult, and the group has only been playing this piece two months. So it still sounds a little squeaky. The kids are very hopeful that they'll get put into the same configuration next year, with the same coach, and that they'll be able to learn and perfect all the movements next year. Then I'll post the whole thing ;-). As is, it's six minutes long.

• CZ's caveat: "I really messed up badly a couple of times!" They're fifteen and it's a work in progress, so perhaps you'll forgive them?

• It was my first time using my new handheld recorder. I set the recording volume too high and there's a bit of fuzz during the loudest parts of the piece, and some extraneous tapping at the end as I tried to turn the thing off.

• And I withhold all names and faces to protect CZ's friends, who have no idea I have a blog. And I don't have a photo anyway, because I goofily forgot to put the memory card in my camera. Oh, well! I got the music, and that's the important part.

This is not a light piece.The second movement of this trio was written in 1945 in memory of one of Shostakovich's closest friends. The fourth movement was supposedly written in the memory of the Holocaust victims, and thus includes bits of klezmer music. But the music throughout is compelling enough even without knowing the story behind it.

And one last thing: Being in a chamber group has been a very encouraging experience for CZ this year. It's hard to get a chamber group going that works and wants to keep playing together. These three high schoolers, two girls and a boy born in three different countries, clicked almost immediately because they all love music and want to play well. When they came out to perform, you could tell that they worked together very naturally. I'm really pleased that they've gelled and also that they were assigned an excellent coach.

Enjoy!