Twitching

Like my friend Sleepy, we have been out twitching. In fact, at the bird sanctuary we went to with friends from the Nature Park, they even had blinds that you could go into and peer out at the birdies. The place itself was amazing enough, you could hike round trails for hours if you wanted, and it is always brilliant to go on any kind of nature walk with Lori and Jo because they simply know so much. But my friends Beth and Dave, who were also with us, are real value added because they know about both British and North American natural history, so they can not only tell you what the things we're seeing are, but they can also say,
'...and we call it a ... in Europe,' or, '....and that's related to a ....'Dave also reputedly looks like Harry Potter only without the specs, so to counteract that, he's had all his hair shaved ...well, nearly off.

In a tree in the lane leading down to the sanctuary, called ironically, Reifel, we saw a horned owl. I do have a picture of it, but the foliage of the tree is so close and dark that you can hardly see the owl. These are amazing creatures, they just sit up there, so still and look at you.

The most spectacular birds at the moment, because you can see them flying in the south of Richmond, are the snow geese, sadly the biggest flocks of them were seen from the car, so I only have quite a lame picture of a small number.

Excuses, excuses.

The birds who were most up for being photographed were the wide variety of ducks. There were signs up telling you not to chase them, but the truth was, they chased us. Mostly in a friendly way, except when they tried to take out Harry, er I mean Dave.

Enough! In the evening, Kevin and I watched one of last Monday's film picks, Juon 2. The video rental place were heavily pushing this, presumably since the Grudge 2 is due out soon. We enjoyed it. We always find it interesting to watch the foreign language films because it shows you some of the culture of the place in an incidental way.
I think from reputation I was expecting the film to be creepier, but it was good, I liked the method of overlapping the stories of some of the characters. I found the acting style at times of great tension to be somewhat melodramatic, but not to the extent that it interfered with belief.

Lying in bed at night, we had one of those surreal conversations about whether Colin and Justin would ever tackle Japan and whether it would have any impact on haunted houses. I tended to think it might, Kevin felt that maybe the houses might tackle Colin and Justin.