Crow-black

Look, I'm not exactly depressed. It's more that I feel even more purposeless than usual. Filming the robin and doing my videos had become part of my daily schedule. I was looking forward to the warmer weather when I could just sit with him. I'd started to do that: read or work outside, with Bobbit hopping around me, occasionally buzzing my head with his fly-bys or singing a quiet phrase close by.

My friend Gay was talking to me about edge effects. Where two habitats meet, biodiversity tends to increase. You get the species adapted to one habitat and those adapted to the other and then others who like both. While I was spending time with Bobbit, the psychological and emotional edge habitat, the ecotone of soul, felt as it it had expanded. More thoughts and feelings. More variations of psyche and consciousness. A blossoming into shared being.

This is a borderland of becoming. And I've lost it.

Already, I have experienced this loss, with CD, though I was and am willing to believe that CD had moved away from Droopy and Three rather than been killed.

And I feel... implicated in Bobbit's disappearance. Had he become too confident and so easy prey? Had he actually been struggling (those feathers) and I had failed to notice? In addition, there's the concern for his mate and the potential brood, who are unlikely to survive with just one parent.

While considering parenthood, it has also been noticeable that for the last two years I have seen no young crows. Maybe it's still too early this year - I am writing on May 15th. I worry about egg shells that are too fragile. For some reason. That is a problem for gannets, but is related to the pollution in the sea.

Which reminds me to heartily recommend Charles Foster's Cry of the Wild. Foster was the guy who lived like a badger - I have mentioned him before. He also wrote a fabulous book about swifts. This book contains fictionalised but fact based stories of the lives of eight animals (fox, orca, human, mayfly, rabbit, gannet, otter, eel). It is wonderful, detailed, poetic, polemical, angry, passionate, heart-breaking and real. The mayfly section is astonishing. I seem to have managed to forget the human entirely, though I recall details of all the non-humans... oh yes, I recall now... it wasn't my favourite. But of the others, there is no favourite. They were each riveting in their own way.

Maybe he's working on robin and crow. Maybe I should. I never will. What about oak tree?