“Mam always said it was only a fool who didn’t fear the sea, and I’ve tried to live by that. But there’s no way to conjure fear if it doesn’t exist. And here is the undeniable truth: I have never feared the sea. I have loved it with every breathe of me, every beat of me.”
—still thinking about Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
After 4 races it’s tied 2-2. With all the talk about NZ supposedly having a faster boat it actually has all depended on tactics in the minute before and the minute after the start: Whichever boat ekes out an advantage there has gone on to win every race. And it’s always been the boat with port-tack entry.
All those people who predicted sweeps or 7-2: yeah, not so much. Can’t wait to see the rest of it.
I couldn’t remember where I’d seen that, so I dug. It turns out to be a slight misquotation (“any” instead of “a”), though I’m not sure that isn’t an improvement. The original blog appears to be gone, but the exchange has been screencap-immortalized here:
That’s awesome! I’m glad you’re seeing more birds and getting more confident identifying the ones you’ve seen before.
On the question of how many black phoebes to report, it’s a judgment call as to whether you think there were two birds or just one that moved around. Since you saw the original one back where you saw it the first time I think you’d be on solid ground reporting two birds total. I often see several black phoebes in the same general area, each staying in its own smallish spot. But it’s really a question of what you think is likely.
The bird-counting question I sometimes wrestle with is when I’m hearing a group of birds of a particular species, but I don’t take the time to get a solid visual count of them, how many do I report? I try to be conservative and only report the minimum number I’m confident would have been required to produce the vocalizations I actually heard. But sometimes (especially with bushtits) I’ll put down 4 or 5 based on the calls I’m hearing, and then the whole flock will cross an open space and I’ll realize there were 15 or 20 birds.
That’s really neat about your leucistic sparrow. Birds like that are a good way to focus on structural, rather than plumage, differences. If you know a species well enough you won’t need to look for particular colors and markings in particular places because you’ll have things like size and shape to guide you.
Another possibility is that it’s a different species. Weird rarities do show up at times, and if they’re a flocking species they’ll sometimes flock with whatever common birds are around. I’ve seen a Harris’s sparrow, for example, that was flocking with white-crowned sparrows, and might at first glance have been mistaken for a leucistic white-crowned.
Uncle Tae-ho, you know what? In space there’s no up or down. From the universe’s viewpoint, nothing is worthless or precious. Everything is precious in its own place.
