a curatorial content blog of modern and contemporary poetry, poetics, photography, philosophy, permaculture, and the arts

“Everything pours forth. Photographs their history. Books their words. Walls their sounds.”

Source: Patti Smith on the Two Kinds of Masterpieces and Her Fifty Favorite Books

Source: Front Room Guerrilla Girls Details | Baltimore Museum of Art

clamor of gulls
my mother adrift
on the boardwalk

by Glenn G. Coats Acorn, #34, 2015

Source: Daily Haiku: Aug. 26, 2016 | Charlotte Digregorio’s Writer’s Blog

Photo by Stephanie Ware, The Field Museum.

In their natural habitat, where they build their nests on isolated cliff ledges, peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) mate for life. But do they step out on their mates after moving to a big city like Chicago?

Big city living doesn’t stop peregrine falcons from mating for life

Crows’ Roost, Hartford*

Another attempt by man to reach the stars. This time in 1918 Insurance Capital of the world Hartford, CT, when work began on the city’s first skyscraper, the Travelers Tower, named after the Travelers Insurance Company. Workers at the building site raucously complained about the damn noise, the damn bird shit from all those crows. A predator, the Peregrine Falcon, was introduced to drive them off, long before the mid 1900s when DDT put the Peregrine on the endangered species list. Seems the Travelers Peregrine Falcon was formalized into a program in 1997 when the fledgling Amelia, raised in captivity, was brought to the Tower and returned for nesting ever since, until the Spring of 2011. How to know why?

And what about those damn crows? These days their roost numbers in the thousands. They have flourished since their 1918 eviction, maybe by making the University of Hartford campus and outlier property abutting Mark Twain Drive and the housing projects their main home. From there they make a daily 35-mile circle, taking in Elizabeth Park, Trinity College, the Hartford Seminary, the West Hartford and Bloomfield Reservoirs, even just over the border into western Massachusetts. I’ve seen them in our travels and very glad to when I do. They post sentries while the community feeds and the oldest eat first. They make a rich language of 150 different sounds, know how to use tools, and possess a fine memory.

sheen
on the crow’s wing
early Spring

Donna Fleischer
January 17, 2013
Contemporary Haibun Online

*Eventually, a Hartford Courant news story reported that Amelia’s effective man-made aerie, which looked out over the nearby Connecticut River with its bountiful fish, was dismantled by Travelers for building purposes. Man maketh and Man taketh away . . . 

– Donna Fleischer