I and the Bird #49 is beautifully presented as a discovery of the poetic nature of birding by those who participated in the carnival.  Splendidly presented and worth a serious perusal.  The poem itself gave me chills, yet don’t let that be your only experience with it.  Each line links to a different birding post, so read it once for the magic Dave made of it, then read it again to follow his creativity to the original avian piece from which he drew the carnival’s energy.

I refuse to say anything about the death of Jerry Falwell other than no one deserved it more.  If hell was real, there would have been a spot reserved just for him, one that would ensure the most vile suffering no living creature could imagine.  But while I’m on the subject, let me beg that you go read this excerpt from Christopher Hitchens’ recent interview on CNN.  It won’t take long and will certainly make clear precisely how I feel—not to mention precisely what is true.

Before anyone attempts to admonish me for speaking ill of the dead, let me remind you of my comment with regards to Steve Irwin when someone else tried to take me to task for speaking my mind instead of treating him with respect because he was dead: “I don’t believe in postmortem political correctness any more than I believe in political correctness period.  I didn’t like [him] and still don’t.  His death changed nothing in that regard, and I certainly have no intention of tempering my opinions based on what you do and don’t want to hear.”  I stand by that conviction.  Death changes nothing about my opinions when it comes to ghoulish figures like Falwell.  I owe him nothing, and I certainly don’t intend to give him one bit of respect simply because he’s now worm food.  No one—in life or death—deserves more from me than I feel appropriate, and dying has absolutely nothing to do with my impressions and feelings and opinions.  It never will.

Huge Snow Melt Revealed in Antarctica: “Rising temperatures caused a layer of snow blanketing a California-sized region of Antarctica to melt, the U.S. space agency NASA said in a statement on Tuesday. A team of scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the University of Colorado said new satellite imagery had revealed a vast expanse of snow melt in 2005 where it had previously been considered unlikely. The NASA statement described the findings as ‘the most significant melt observed using satellites during the past three decades.'”

This is troubling.  “Crows are associated with death, but not like this. Numbers of crows and the related blue jay in the north-eastern US are down by nearly half in some places. The cause is West Nile virus, responsible for 179 human deaths since it arrived in North America in 1999, and which is carried mainly by birds.”  But there’s more.  “Birds that once flourished in suburban skies, including robins, bluebirds and crows, have been devastated by West Nile virus, a study found. Populations of seven species have had dramatic declines across the continent since West Nile emerged in the United States in 1999, according to a first-of-its-kind study. The research, to be published Thursday by the journal Nature, compared 26 years of bird breeding surveys to quantify what had been known anecdotally.”  Read that second link for statistics and more information, both of which I find rather heartbreaking and disturbing.