I'm back!

Make no mistake - time has still not corrected itself in my brain; tonight does not feel like Friday night, nor does today feel like the penultimate day of June, but somewhere in the last week, my universe has tilted itself back onto its axis. It started with a trip home and some bird watching.

Two weeks ago my folks were so kind to fly James and I home for Father's Day weekend. We caught a flight from Raleigh Friday evening; Saturday morning found us drinking coffee around my parents kitchen table and admiring the frenzy of activity at their new birdfeeder.

Stan Tekiela has produced some great field guides, including the Birds of Missouri Field Guide that my father had purchased. That morning, he recited the different sightings from his checklist and we discussed the fascinating habits of different birds - the chickadees, sparrows, cardinals, grackles, house finches, and blue jays. While James and I are no strangers to these birds - we had dabbled in birding in Southern Illinois, which has the same profile as St. Louis - my father was in the middle of telling us that a blue jay's feathers are not actually blue when a red-bellied woodpecker alighted upon the feeder. Not unlike this picture:

Woodpeckers are my favorite birds to try and sight while in the woods. They have a very distinctive call which you can hear long before you ever - if you are lucky - spot it. It was pretty nifty, seeing that big bugger (9" tall!) fly out of the woods to on the feeder, scattering the chickadees and sparrows left and right. My father joyously checked that box off the list in the back of the book.

The book is organized by color, so if you see a bird, you can thumb to the pages and quickly scan to (hopefully) identify the bird before it flies away. One bird that we all agreed we'd love to see is the male Indigo Bunting - a small song bird with rich blue coloring.

The rest of that day was the perfect reprieve from the oscillating emotions and racing thoughts that has colored the last several weeks and that night, it stormed. I slept deeply and did not dream.

------

I've written before about my love of running in Queeny Park; that Sunday morning I headed out to wander the hills and trails with no specific mileage in mind. Queeny was thick with vegetation and as the sun heated up the meadows and woods, the steam rose and with it the smell of damp earth, rotting leaves, and sweet honeysuckle.

As I rounded the reclaimed wildflower meadow, there, swaying atop the heavy bud of a thistle flower was the male Indigo Bunting.

Turns out that he, too, like the blue jay does not actually have blue pigmentation in his feather. "Their jewel-like color comes instead from microscopic structures in the feathers that refract and reflect blue light, much like the airborne particles that cause the sky to look blue."

Pretty cool trick for a little songbird.