birds, not on wires

On a recent walk I took with my sister, who I have nicknamed after a bird, I saw a couple of birds that I have never seen before. One was black, one was brown. One was alive, the other was dead. Sometimes you can slow down and notice mundane things when you're with people you love. I knew the general type of one of the birds (the dead one, which was clearly an owl, even to the untrained eye), but I had no clue on the other. There were a couple of the black-red-orange birds hanging out on some cattails, but the owl was solitary. It was strange; the owl must have died fairly recently. He (she?) was right under a telephone wire, just next to a phone, so I wondered if maybe he had been on a wire and gotten electrocuted, or something. But the body hadn't decomposed at all - for which I was grateful - but the body seemed really awkward. By the way, owls have ginormous talons. Just saying. You can't see them well in this shot, but they're there, and if I were a mouse, I would have trembled in terror.

Here's the black bird in action.

I think as I get older, I'm changing. I used to hate birds. HATE them. With an intense and gloriously-fire-hot passion. But now I kind of admire them. (Except crows...shudder. The other day, I saw an entire murder of them. We're talking, fifty of the things in one tree, caw-ing up a macabre to-do. It was uber creepy, I'm not going to lie.) They have to try to hard to adapt in this crazy world we live in. They find interesting hiding places and manage to hide from cats and humans and other birds and airplanes and snakes and all other sorts of bird-eating things. So really, it's amazing that there are any left at all. Except pigeons and crows. One species seems too dumb to die out and the other seems too smart to allow itself to become trapped.

*And how about I throw in a random picture of a beautiful moon on a beautiful warm night in central Washington to round things off?