Hi Tweets,

While stopping to chat with Evelyn Whiteside at roadside late this afternoon
then just leaving, I saw a long-necked bird warily pacing in the grass about
10 meters behind her car. Strange, I thought; don't usually see yellowlegs
pottering around on the shoulder of a road. Sometimes I'm slower than usual.
The Angel of Free Gifts heaved a brick at my head to get its attention.
Doink. Oh jeez, Evelyn, gimme your bins quickquickquick (mine were already
stashed in my backpack). While we had been talking, a juvenile *Upland
Sandpiper* had flown onto the grassy shoulder of the road where it doglegs
from Grauer to Ferguson Road on Sea Island and started to feed in the grass
just behind her car.

The immediate area is a very popular plane-watching spot directly below the
flightpath of the big jets as they make the landing descent and immediately
E of the runway. The location is also the beginning of the bike lane along
Ferguson.

We watched the bird for about ten minutes until heavy truck, car and
rollerblade traffic (and for the ten minutes the bird was on the shoulder,
that stretch suddenly turned into The Crossroads of the Universe, then
quietened to its usual snooze as soon as the bird left) frightened the bird
so much it flew several hundred meters into the airport and landed in rough
pasture between the airport fence and the end of the runway, where it was
visible only when it put its head up out of the grass and unidentifiable at
that distance in heat shimmer.

Evelyn took some photographs but the bird was at such distance that they'll
probably show 'bird sp.', if that, unfortunately. How cool if they're useable.

This was a *life* bird for both Evelyn and I, one I thought I'd never see;
they were long gone from the part of Ontario in which I grew up, and they're
so scarce out here. And it looked *just* like the illustrations in the
books: a large, liquid dark eye in a small round head on top of an elegantly
slim neck. A long-winged, long-tailed, mostly pale-buff and truly lovely
bird. Thanks be given to the fates that stopped each of us to talk and look
at photographs for an hour along a part of the road neither of has or would
ever stop under normal circumstances.

Michael Price The Sleep of Reason Gives Birth to Monsters
Vancouver BC Canada -Goya
mprice at mindlink.net