Summer Is Flying By
Hello everyone! We hope you are having a wonderful summer. It's hard to believe we are already nearing August. We've been enjoying an abundance in our gardens and the company of friends. What is new in your lives? Reading any other good books? Let us know in the comment section! (Located below the blog post). Love to all.
As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each
hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its
name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
Female Belted Kingfisher. Image from Cornell Lab of Ornithology
The Belted Kingfisher (Megaceryle alcyon) is a blue-gray bird with energetic flight and a piercing, rattling call. They patrol up and down rivers and shorelines, diving to catch fish, crayfish, and other aquatic prey with a heavy, straight bill. You will probably hear them before you see them, but their distinctive profile can be spotted as they fly over open water, perch on riverside branches, or make long commuting flights over fields and forests. The Belted Kingfisher nests in burrows along earthen banks, and they are limited in some areas by the availability of suitable nesting sites. Their tunnels slope upward from the entrance, perhaps to keep water from entering, and range in length from 1-8 feet. They are one of the few bird species in which the female is more brightly colored than the male. Males have one blue band across their white breast while females have a blue and chestnut band. As nestlings, Belted Kingfishers have acidic stomachs, which help them digest bones, fish scales, and arthropod shells. By the time they leave the nest, their stomach chemistry changes, and they begin regurgitating pellets which accumulate on the ground around fishing and roosting perches. These birds wander widely, showing up in the Galapagos Islands, Hawaii, the British Isles, the Azores, Iceland, Greenland, and the Netherlands. Pleistocene fossils of Belted Kingfishers (up to 600,000 years old) have been unearthed in Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas.
Male Belted Kingfisher. Image from Cornell Lab of Ornithology
The Kingfisher by Mary Oliver
The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world--so long as you don't mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your
whole life
that doesn't have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.
water
remains water--hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could
believe.
I don't say he's right. Neither
do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the
silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and
easy cry
I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.