first pee, red wing blackbird

In honor of today’s snowstorm and in anticipation of the spring, please humbly accept this days’ blog:


I just realized that I have to accept the fact that I cannot make a
living doing bird calls. I don't want to have to drink water for a living
and so my famous red wing blackbird call would be lost. For those of you
who also know how to do that call you know it's lost at first flush anyway.

I got to thinking about the qigong exercise called 'chasing the clouds'
or 'following the clouds'. This is the one where you go from side to side following your fingers with
your eyes. Chasing the clouds exercise brings me back to birds.
Who else but birds really chase clouds? 

According to Peterson's Birds East of the Rockies the onomatopoeia (or would it be transliteration in this case?) of the blackbird's call is:  konk-la-ree or o-ka-lay.  Now the konk-la-ree blackbirds are generally from the north and those that sound more like o-ka-lay tend to be from the south. That said, most blackbirds prefer the undulating sway of the phragmites or marsh grasses to the solid stillness of a piling. This is how one can tell them apart from seagulls.


I bow to the spirit of the neurosis in all of us.