Spring 55: Wagons and Such

May 14-15, 2011
dreary, rainy

Turns out Friday's sunshine fooled my body just briefly; I spent the weekend fighting a cold.

So much for pushing myself in hopes of getting back on the sunrise wagon. It's been so hard lately, what with Acadia "hangover", late-night rehearsals, and sunrise ever earlier.

I guess my body just needs more rest than I've been giving it. My clever psychological trick of setting the time on my alarm clock an hour late (because 6am looks way less daunting than 5am) isn't enough to make up for so many hours of lost-sleep.

I simply have to accept that I am not as hard-core as I'd like to be, as much as it hurts my ego to admit it.

Saturday I was in bed all day, and didn't make it out for my daily walk. However, I decided to appoint as the birds-of-the-day the birds (robins?) who, at 3:45am, were making a racket outside an open window when I went downstairs for some water.

No recording, just a memory of my aching throat and unfettered annoyance at these birds for singing so far in advance of dawn.

Today I was feeling a bit better, and I took a dusk stroll in Bussey Brooks Meadow. It was a lovely dusk chorus, and I swear the place feels even more like a jungle in this misty drizzly half-light.

Today's bird made a really distinctive two-syllable creak:


Here it is in context:


I suspect it is a Common Grackle, as it was a medium-sized black bird (lacking the red patches of the red-winged blackbirds).