Travelers
It’s a bright, cool Sunday morning. Early on, there was a heavy fog on the park pasture as the moist, warm ground met the cold northern air. It’s gone now, chased away by the sun. The rain washed air is clear and clean. The forecast for the week is dropping temps. We’ll soon be down in the 40s at night. Not really earth shaking news if you live somewhere else, but it’s what’s happening here. So, it's all I’ve got.
I refreshed the bird seed this morning, and the doves are back. I have a big congregation of morning doves. They cluster in the mesquite and swoop down to feed. I also have a pair of Eurasian Collared Doves who don’t particularly enjoy their cousins. Or anyone else for that matter. The latter is classed as an invasive, but I’ve stopped worrying about that. As I’ve said before, I’m fairly certain animals just follow the food and the habitat and in a warming world, we’ll see more and more of that, I’m sure.
In my view, how those birds behave is not much different than how those first European explorers behaved.They tended to think of themselves as being above the fray, bringers of civilization, and dispassionate observers of what they perceived as lesser beings. Overall, they mostly didn’t care about the impact of rats and pigs and bugs on the places they visited. They came because they could. So maybe they and we aren’t much different than those collared doves who think this is a nice place to live and there’s food.