My cousin found her clinging to a grating over a rushing river of lime water at the power sub-station where he works. He brought her to Bruces' School for Wayward Chicks. We named her Euphonia. As you will recall if you've ever had swallows nest on your porch, she sounds like a chronically squeaky hinge. Grasshopper is the only oil.
Puck thought she was something to eat, of course.
I found out that the Spanish word for roadrunner, paisano, means "fellow countryman."
He killed his first lizard yesterday, dancing, puffing his feathers, and throwing his wings out like a matador. He considered himself a very mighty bird after this, something in the order of a St. George, and climbed high into the oak tree at dusk. He refused to come down, and so roosted outside for the first time.
Sadly, this morning one of those shitty mutts that hang around here caught him by the tail and pulled all his feathers out but two. He was getting too chummy with those mongrels. It's a good lesson. Nonetheless I gathered up his feathers, soft and tipped with blood, and avenged him.
We've had two swallow families make nests on our front porch. The babies are gone from one and the second batch are still little brown-flecked white eggs in a bed of chicken down. Call me crazy, but they build nests creatively. The first was a two-tone gray and brown. the second is gray and white divided by a vivid yellow stripe. I assume they pick different spots to get their mud from, and apply it with spit. For some reason, they went and found an even stripe's worth of yellow mud right in the middle of building the nest, then switched to an entirely new color after that. Maybe all these wayward birds are homing in on your psychic waves to teach you secrets of the cloud world.
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