Wednesday 16 April 2008

Little Yellow Birds

We have weird weather forecasts for the weekend, maybe snow flurries, maybe just very cold rain and temperatures hovering around zero.
A couple of ads are annoying me. One is a parody of that film where Robert Redford or some old geezer wants to sleep with Demi Moore for a million dollars.
In the ad, some guy admires another's car and asks if he can borrow it for one night for a million dollars. No, says the car owner. Then the price of the car is revealed and it costs $20K. Ho-hum. I'm sure that's part of the humour, but to me it just makes the whole thing lame and not work. Can't remember what the other ad was.

Back at the OK Corral, or Nature Park, the business of the day has been informing the public about Snow Geese. Not me, I don't have to do that, but Kris and Rich have had to have a public meeting. Snow Geese have been all descending on school playing fields and having a nice poo before flying off. The public are distraught. Not so distraught that they'd consider not walking their dogs on school grounds and letting them crap there, but you know.
The snow geese come here from Russia to overwinter, but their habits have changed in recent years. Instead of some of them going down to California, they have been staying in BC, and since two of their three local habitats have been all but destroyed, they are all coming to Richmond and frightening the horses, or whatever.
It seems like we humans have caused the problems for the birds, but far be it from us to actually put it right, no, we must shoot the creatures or harass them in some way.

Today, a dad at one of the programmes asked me how I had spotted a hummingbird up high in a tree that I'd pointed out to the children.
'I...just knew where it would be,' I said. On my way home I thought about that. Less than three years ago I'd never seen a hummingbird or a bald eagle, or a red-tailed hawk or even a towhee. Now I know where to look for them, what sort of sky I'm likely to find them in and what they sound like.
So, a handful down, several hundred to go. I'm going to move on to the yellow birds now, the yellow birds just keep on coming in waves, and they can't all be bloody finches.
LYBs.
Little yellow birds. Ho-hum.

2 comments:

Sleepy said...

Ironically, when I was at school Canadian Geese used to come and shit all over our hockey pitch!
We used to laugh at the girls who'd come to play us, dressed in shorts,t-shirts and pristine white trainers.

You'd get one or two 'Sturdy Gals' in a team who didn't mind getting covered in crap.
Never a whole team though.
Soon as a couple had shit on them that was all they could think about. Team plans and tactics literally went for shit.
We were an unbeaten rabble, dressed in our non matching tracksuit trousers, longsleeve shirts, hats and gloves!

Happy Days!

Schneewittchen said...

One of the schools I worked at had a netball team like that, only more Vicky Pollard. They scared the living bejabers out of every other team in the area. I understood quite how far that area extended when I went for an interview in Greenwich and the Head of PE found out what school I was from. She was a black woman, but I swear she turned white.