Shrikes, buntings and more

I spoke a little too quickly when I wrote two weeks ago that the migration was almost over. Although the numbers are very low, the diversity is pretty good.

This morning we just did some maintenance on the truck (changed the oil, etc.), and I don’t have duty again until midnight so I have the afternoon off. I took advantage of the time off to go birdwatching for a little while. Although it was quite warm, I saw a great grey shrike, a masked shrike, two red-backed shrikes, several rufous bush-robins, a “feldegg” yellow wagtail, a harrier sp., some pallid swifts, a pair of ortolan buntings, and all sorts of unidentified warblers. Also probably migrating were dozens of tortoiseshell-type butterflies. The ortolan buntings are in this photo. I was hoping that they were cinereous buntings when I saw them, but when I looked at the field guide I learned that: cinereous buntings don’t have red beaks and feet, and the grey-necked and Cretzchmar’s buntings don’t have the yellow throat that is clearly apparent in the male in the picture. Honestly, if the beak hadn’t been pink I would have sworn that the birds were cinereous buntings. I still have a lot to learn about birds. Ortolan buntings are well-known in France because they are hunted and eaten as a bite-sized delicacy in Provence.

I was especially happy to see three species of shrikes. The friendliest one of the three turned out to be one of the two male red-backed shrikes that were sheltering themselves from the wind behind the clump of reeds behind the laundry trailers. Ever since my brothers and I used to organize trips to the forest of Fontainebleau to find shrikes, they have been one of my favorite birds. They are famous for building up “larders,” where they store insects and mice by spearing them unto barbed wire spikes or tree thorns. Although I have seen many shrikes here and there is suitable barbed wire everywhere, I have yet to find a larder. That is probably because they don’t nest here. The raptor-like beak is fairly evident in this picture.

I haven’t lately been very involved in operations. On the one hand, this gives me a chance to rest, but on the other hand I am anxious to get back out in the desert to see if I can do something worthwhile and interesting. There have been many small things to do here, though, including a physical fitness test which I did pretty well on. I did 96 push-ups in two minutes, 77 sit-ups in two minutes, and I ran two miles in 11 minutes and 14 seconds. I like to shoot for a perfect score of three hundred every time (to top out on the scale in my age group, I have to do at least 77 push-ups in 2 minutes, 81 sit-ups in 2 minutes, and 2 miles in 13 minutes), but I scored a 295 this time because I couldn’t do sit-ups as fast as usual.

Finding good quotes before each blog entry turned out to be quite a bit more difficult than I expected, so I just picked something out of Pablo Neruda. This is from El fantasma del buque de carga:

“Mira el mar el fantasma con su rostro sin ojos:el circulo del día, la tos del buque, un pajaroen la ecuacion redonda y sola del espacio,”

I don’t have a poetic translation handy, but this basically means: “The ghost looks at the sea with his eyeless face: / the circle of the day, the coughing of the ship, a bird / in the rounded and lonely equation of the universe.”