100
Active flux.
Beginning to pry.
The element T'UNG, the boy,
Surely completed,
Does not yet have the knowledge.
Bob:
How many birds have been displaced by me?
They're huddled here together making their last stand.
Against me! The one who loves them so much
As to try to sing their songs
And even be them.
I'm a bird just like they are.
There's just too many of us
Trying to be them
Rather than letting them be.
Nancy: Day 3. It's so nice waking up and stepping into a cool morning with bits of shade, and birds singing like crazy. We spotted some more species on the way to the wildlife refuge around Big Lake Alice. We saw a magpie. They're not like Heckle and Jeckle at all. They're black and white and the black had a gorgeous iridescence that could have fooled us into thinking it was blue the other day. Bob thinks that bird was a magpie.
We saw a Harris' Hawk sitting atop a telephone pole next to the dirt road. We stopped the bus to look at him and he looked at us. We looked at each other for some time until he flew away and we could identify him by his underside. As he kind of hovered and soared over a field, a smaller (though still good- sized) bird started to scream and dive at the hawk. The shape of its wing and the sound of its scream seemed to indicate that it was some kind of falcon, but we never got a good look at it.
When we arrived at Big Lake Alice (or "Big Alice" as we started to call it), we startled three white-tailed deer! We parked and walked along the shore, sort of in the direction that the deer took. I took a bunch of photographs of tree hollows, dead branches, animal tracks, the water . . . you know, natural stuff. When we couldn't walk any farther, we stopped in a really pretty spot with a few dead magnificent trees and a bunch of cool dry dead bark.