Needing to get away from the news of the day, on short notice I decided to mimic Walter Mitty, go to the Denver Zoo and escape with my Canon into the world of species I'll never see in the wild. It was a beautiful day, not too many doublewide strollers with distracted drivers at the wheel and all the animals were in the right cages. Among the birds, my favorites were a Hyacinth Macaw, Green Wood Hoopoe, White-eared Catbird, Great Hornbill, Hawk-headed Parrot, Chestnut-backed Thrush, White-winged Wood Duck and Storm Stork. My favorite non-bird was a Dogfaced Puffer, or was it the Imitation Dart Frog, or the Northern Tree Shrew?
Stapled to my kitchen wall is a poem titled "The Perfect Life" by Donald Hall, cut from the pages of an old "New Yorker" magazine, that fake news rag. It states: "Unicorns envy their cousin horses a smooth forehead. Horses weep for lack of horns. Hills cherish the ambition to turn into partial differential equations, which want to be poems, or dogs, or the Pacific Ocean, or whiskey, or a gold ring. The man wearing the noose envies an other who fondles a pistol in a motel room." At the Denver Zoo it has always struck me the captive Red-crowned Cranes look longingly skyward when the wild geese settle into City Park. Certain wild birds hang out at the Zoo envying the steady supply of food given the Smew and other kept fowl. Of the later, the highlights were: Yellow-rumped Warbler (2 drinking water in the rhino area), Bushtits (in ponderosa pines near Tropical Discovery), and Common Grackles (where they always are, in with, and over, the waterfowl near the Great Apes building). Also of note, the trees on the island in City Park are bustling with freshly-arrived Double-crested Cormorant society. As the sun sat in the West, the Somalian Wild Ass made some faces while braying hideously. It reminded me it was time to fight the rush hour traffic home to Fort Collins, back to the news of the day. Dave Leatherman Fort Collins -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cobirds+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to cobirds@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cobirds/DM5PR06MB2747DFC04EB1D2D07A6854ABC12B0%40DM5PR06MB2747.namprd06.prod.outlook.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
