Nature strikes back

First of all, to my astonishment, I've lost weight this week, much more than I would have thought.  At least is serves as motivation to keep on.

On Saturday we went to the quinta and stayed overnight.  Sunday morning, in the cool of the front porch under a lazy ceiling fan, I began to wax poetic in my mind about Nature.  The sky was a washed, water-color blue, clouds of butterflies (pale green, yellow, orange, white) jostled with hummingbirds around flowering shrubs and the rose bush, high in the air hawks glided gracefully, dipping and soaring, and the horses grazed calmly in a far field.

As if it weren't reality aplenty that there were enough cattle ticks around to supply a major feed lot, and when the wind was right the eau de steers knocked us off our feet, as I sat there ignoring these minor inconveniences, a dove suddenly came whipping under the porch roof and tried to land on my head.  Discovering at the very last minute that the landing place was a living creature, in a frenzied flurry of wings and feathers that caught in my hair, it took off again.

That was all it took to break up the moment of poesy, by dang!  My main concern was whether it had pooped on my head.  That it hadn't seemed almost miraculous.  (I have a long history of being pooped on by birds...)  It also confirmed my opinion that doves are unbelievably dumb and it is amazing there are so many of them.  They are the last birds to get out of the way on a road or highway and the only ones my cats caught often enough so as to supply themselves with a complete meat diet.  Every other kind of bird in our yard seemed to know exactly where the cats were hiding out, except for the doves.  The starlings would even flutter around scolding the cats, sounding warnings, or occasionally divebombing them, but doves don't seem to speak starling.

No poetry, but poetic justice, I suppose, considering that I fed my dog braised dove breasts the other day.