Since we are settled into our 50s, my wife and I have settled into comfortable middle-aged hobbies as well. I cross stitch, make things with paper, and read books into a microphone for unseen strangers. My wife restores old tools and bikes and bits of metal (she is currently removing 60 years of grime from the hinges and handles of our kitchen cabinets in our new house — they are copper under there, not indeterminate black metal!) and watching birds that visit the several feeders she has set up in our yard.
Which is what prompted me to open this book when I cam across it in Gutenberg. It’s Birds of the Plains by Douglas Dewar.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46394
I thought it would be about the American Great Plains and might be of interest because we have toyed with the idea of a “go see America” road trip.
Well, it turns out that it’s actually about birds of the plains of India, and talks about birds we’ll likely never see in person because odds of our visiting India are pretty low. Maybe a David Attenborough nature special will give us a glimpse (yes, we happily watch those, I told you — middle aged.) anyway, skimming around in this book was fun. It has 42 chapters but most are short. I’m not as practiced as many here at eyeballing lengths of texts, but I would guess they are mostly between 5 and 15 minutes worth of recorded reading each.
His descriptions of some of the birds are just delightful. Like this:
“The adjutant bird (Leptoptilus dubius) is one of Nature’s little jokes. It is a caricature of a bird, a mixture of gravity and clownishness. Everything about it is calculated to excite mirth—its weird figure, its great beak, its long, thin legs, its conspicuous pouch, its bald head, and every attitude it strikes. The adjutant bird is a stork which has acquired the habits of the vulture.”
Seems like it would be a fun project!
Colleen