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Incidental birding, Charleston, SC



caution :( listing & numbers purists please delete now)


Observations from limbo


When the automatic glass doors open in overlapping sequence
to admit a new arrival, a few syllables of mockingbird song
slip into the air-conditioned building as if fleeing the humid air
of the parking lot for a more hospitable climate.

In the hotel lobby, morning sunlight through translucent drapes
brightens the last few trailing ivy leaves from an ornate planter
overstuffed with silk flowers centered on an oval table of polished veneers.
Flowers that require dusting rather than rain or sunlight.  A place for
coffee,
elevators and waiting. Framed prints of Carolina Parakeets and Wrens,
the extinct and the ubiquitous staking out wall space.

>From the fourteenth floor, thinly disguised for the superstitious,
a panorama of Charleston marshes and bridges, the braiding of underpasses
and overpasses, looking down on the backs of tilting vultures,
Royal Terns marking the channel like aerial buoys, small sailboats moored
at safe distances from each other, unmanned, waiting for weekends.

During a break in the seminar, I spot an adult Yellow-crowned Night-Heron
stalking a ditch and watch it lunge after a crab as big as its own head.
After stripping off the legs and claws, the heron swallows the crab’s body
in one piece, then picks up each leg and claw and swallows them
methodically,
without hurry. It then steps into the air and beats heavily along the ditch
to fish
again in the hot sun.  Pause and action.  Crouched heron, suspense and
anticipation,
pantomime of waiting.




Tim Kalbach
Columbia, SC
grebe@mindspring.com