Summer Birdwatching

Halibut has returned from his travels. It's not easy folding one's person into a moderate-sized airplane neck pillow (black and furry, real 'rabbit'). Yet, to save airfare, it was worth it. In fact, since I don't do money, it was the only way. Place before yourself the horrid temptation, swatted away over the course of more than 9 hours each way, of sinking claws deliciously into the fat neck of the fare-paying human. 'Oooo, your pillow vibrates, darling!' That was a suppressed hiss, not a purr, Cretino.

So why did I do it? To see new sights, to smell new smells. To sample the blood of birds on a whole new continent. The earth is dying, my days grow fewer. So thought I, what the hell?

And do you know what I found? Life, fecundity, maniacal cheeping everywhere. Our avian tidbits are doing fine -- at least wherever I was stalking this past summer. Squealing arabesques of jackdaws in North Yorkshire, but in Uppsala too. They wheeled in vasty numbers, above the old university and the cathedral, seeking their evening roost, so many that their stink reached me on the ground. I rubbed my way round the runestones, hoping that one would fall my way. But they didn't even shit on me.