Flamingo Friday: A Reflection on Light and Water

Is it an oil painting, an early Monet of flowers in a field or his first attempt at waterlilies?

Is it the image of creatures high above the rippling surface, unaware of the colors they leak like ink into the water?

Or is it the image of something below that surface, shapes rising waveringly out of the depths, from worlds unfathomable, that will someday, as they break through the skin of the pool, come clear?

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Please Don't Like This Blog

Of course you should like this blog, and get all of your friends and acquaintances to like it, and make me famous and, eventually, rich. But please don’t “like” it.

I am so unutterably tired of being exhorted by everything, including human-rights groups and clothing stores, to “like” them on Facebook, thus demonstrating to the world that I am one of 100 people who visited their site and clicked on a blue icon with an “f” in it.

Because—let’s be very clear here—that’s all it shows. It doesn’t—it can’t—indicate any sort of special feeling, any passionate bond of empathy. And if you don’t “like” something, that doesn’t stop, or prevent, you from liking it—in the ever-so-retro way of actually having an appreciation for it—which you don’t need to advertise in order for it to be true.

It seems to me that people like my blog when they visit it regularly and/or post comments, and that people like me when they demonstrate their fondness for me through their everyday actions. But a stupid blue button is neither an adequate substitute for nor a necessary embellishment of those real gestures and emotions.

I realize this entry is uncharacteristically un-zoological in nature. But this is something that’s been rankling in me for some time now, and I just had to get it out—you know, in words and phrases, the way our ancestors did before the invention of online social media. (Although, I have to say, if there were a “dislike” button available…)

So thanks for reading, and feel free to like or dislike this post. No technology necessary.

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A Melancholy Mongoose for Monday

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Wild Wildlife: A Piping Plover Eludes Me

This was taken at the National Seashore on Cape Cod, where a number of areas of beach near the dunes are roped off for “seabird use.” Piping plovers and terns were nesting there, and the little ploverettes, which look like cotton balls on stilts, were racing about at top speed. Unfortunately, their parents were pretty fast on their feet as well, so my best images of them are as they’re running away. Just another example of how animals don’t pose...

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Flamingo Friday: Ghost Flamingos

Sometimes a slow shutter speed has its advantages.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}