Well, it's been awhile since I dropped in, and chronic insomnia can be useful if you're catching up on the latest local avian news, although you will eventually go completely insane when you're dozing off mid-day, losing things pretty-well on the hour, waking up in ATM enclosures to be greeted by a couple of "Security Personnel" with their BB-guns pointed at you, then handcuffing you and driving you down to Cherry Beach (all the while berating you with comments inappropriate to submit to an undergraduate Engineering weekly, let alone repeat at this wonderful refuge in cyberspace) and snidely implying that you're a "Peeping Tom" -- a little euphemising there -- and a vile, disgusting pervert who should spend the next 20 years or so locked in a cage with other "deviants") ... yep, down to Cherry Beach at three in the a.m. for "further questioning," which involved even more abuse and humiliation and "confiscation" of your Leitz Trinovids (" ... so you won't be prowling respectable neighbourhoods peeking into bedroom windows and whatever else you revolting lowlifes do for your 'jollies' ...") and leaving you there, pantless, in minus-20*C darkness -- ever try hailing a cab at three or four a.m. in January, sans trousers? Good luck to you!
Which, of course, brings me to teenagers. When I was a teenager (I vaguely remember reaching the new, lower drinking age -- thanks, Pierre, and R.I.P., -- but there are huge gaps subsequent to that, probably), I made every effort to keep my Adventures in Field Ornithology my "uncool" secret. Imagine a 'Junior Hippie' (First in my troop to earn a "Talking Down" the Festival-goers Who, Foolishly Ignoring The Hourly Announcements Regarding the Adulterants in the Brown Acid, Man badge!) who emulated the likes of Iron Butterfly -- still not recognized as a full species by The American Society of Really Stuffy Entomologists -- Black Sabbath, Grand Funk Railroad (soon to abbreviate themselves to 'Grand Funk') and spending half of Grade Nine furtively taking in the sights and sounds of Duffin Marsh (Now likely a maze of subdivided clapboard shacks with a tiny stand of Phragmites communis) pathetically nodding in the gentle breeze rolling across Lago de Ontario, hiding my binoculars in my jacket as I made my way back to, ahem, 'civilisation' moving like one of the zig-zagging snipe which were fairly common down that way back in the early '70's ...
Gah -- Margaret is cursing at her alarm clock as I type; sounds a lot like it's going to be another "When are you going to do the rings in the Wildcat? Old Henrietta's sucking two litres of 40-weight a day, you piece of furniture!!!" miserable day ...
So -- what's your personal "It's officially Spring" migrant? So many species were true harbingers back then, before the nuclear station, before all the people with their fruit-laden ornamental shrubs and trees and their feeders ...
So, what's your "It's official now!" migrant?
Where'd I stash my 'jammies?
--NB
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by norman »
"If John Denver wasn\'t already dead, I guess I\'d have to kill him."
