Strange Arrival

This afternoon, about five p.m., I walked into the back yard and, simultaneously, a very big bird flew out of a neighbor's tree and landed on our back fence. Very surprised by it's action, it's size, and it's position on the top of the fence, some fifteen yards ahead of me, I quickly realized that I was looking at a large-ish owl. His back was turned toward me, but he repeatedly turned his face toward me, so I was pretty sure he knew I was there. And he sat there.

I went into the house to get my camera, and when I got back outside, he was still there on top of the fence. I took a few pictures, though he was too far away for my (inadequate) zoom to record much of an image.

I went back inside, and about forty minutes later, I went out again and he was still there though now on the trunk of a tree. Around 6:15, Ed came home, and by then he had moved out on a branch of that same tree. Ed, a better photographer than I, and the possessor of a better camera, took this second photo. For about an hour, the owl posed and presented his many excellent angles to Ed, who put a larger version of this photo up on Flickr in his "Somewhere in Point Roberts" set.

By 8 p.m., he was gone. The bird is a barred owl, of course, and a regular inhabitant of these parts, but I'd never seen one before so close or for so long. Thanks,owl, for the opportunity!

Playing Poker

I don’t actually play poker, largely because my older brother taught me how when I was a kid and that means I think of poker simply as I game in which I will lose. But I vaguely know the rules even now because my grandchildren, when visiting, are avid poker players, their stakes the bowl of foreign coins that we have collected over the past few decades when traveling. So I have up-to-date observations of a lot of games, a lot of talk about what beats what.

In any case, here’s the hand. Of recent days, I have written of my bear, my deer, my owl. They would appear to be my bet. Today, though, my son tells me that today at 10 a.m. in his yard (in central, semi-rural California) he has a cougar with a chicken in its mouth. And yet later today, my older daughter reports, from a small town in New Mexico, that she and her border collie spent some time along the riverbank with a gray fox. The fox gave her and her dog a mildly interested look and then went about his fox work in plain view for some time.

So, what I need to know is this: Does an bear eating compost and a separate deer eating grass (the latter combined with a sleeping owl) beat a cougar with a chicken in its mouth? Or even a gray fox in a small town with a collie in plain sight? Not only that: I knew there were bear, deer, and owl around; he didn’t know he had cougars, and she thought the local gray fox had all been killed. Am I winning or losing? And if I’m losing, what do I need next? A raccoon in a Santa Claus suit?

Or is this just another piece of evidence, somehow, that the financial system is getting worse?