A Black and White Bird Day
I walk the Harrison portage. It has been a week since my last trip, a week of clouds and rain combined with wind. It is a black and white bird day on the big lake. A cormorant (black) surfaces far too close to me as I load the canoe. I wonder how far it has come beneath the water to make such an error. A contingent of buffleheads (black and white) float a bit farther out. Just far enough that I do not threaten them. As I kneel in the canoe and move off from shore, a crow (black) bids me farewell from somewhere inside one of the evergreens. Moving north on calm water I come across some goldeneyes (black and white for all intensive purposes). A cormorant (black) takes off with a pied billed grebe (gray) in formation and I think that I have never seen a pied billed grebe fly. I may be wrong. At the point of the bay, I stop on the shore of the rich townhouses. I find a plastic 5 gallon pail and half fill it with other debris and then leave it for the groundskeeper amongst a fifteen stored ...