An Amazing Day Well-Lived
I am just going to say up-front that the correct pronunciation of "short-lived" rhymes with hived. Long i sound, wived, chived, lived. Conversely "short-lived" like "he lived for a short time" - short i - doesn't make sense gramatically. "lived" is a verb there, and short is an adjective, not an adverb. You would never say, "I lived short." the life is short - like leaf and leaved,: the plant is short-leaved. Mule deer are short-lived.
Today I saw two new life-birds and they were fantastic: My friend Everett and I went out to Abbot's Lagoon in the POint Reyes National Seashore to see two bird species. One of those was the reported lapland longspurs. And we found them. We saw at least three. My first longspur. It was beautiful. I knew it was unusual because it had a streaky back, in contrast to the American pipits it was with, which have mostly unmarked, brown or gray backs. And then the other field marks of the longspur became apparent: the brown auriculars. The light breast and the buffy supraloral stripe over the eye. But mostly you see the really ruddy feathers in the wing. Primary coverts are red-brown. Foxy. The one I saw was eating the heck out of some leaves of a dock or a sagebrush. He ran in little spasmic dashes from one bit of cover to another I was amazed at how fast he (guessing sex, i really dont' know) could run. You got the sense that here was a bird who spent a lot of time running around on the ground. Amazing speed, really.
The other bird we wanted to see was a few reported red-throated pipits. We never saw them. But I did discover 2 Pacific golden plovers. My first. They were AWESOME. Really, totally satisfing views of two birds in fall plumge, golden backs shining, black eyes, long legs, kind of dove like, but sticky to the ground, like they really did not want to fly. I went ninja photographer mode and got pretty close and took, like 100 pictures. About which, sad. I lost about 600 pictures from my camera during a data transfer gone wrong; Gone ferruginous hawk pictures, of perching and getting ridden out of the meadow by 4 ravens pictures. Gone giant lupine. Gone, pacific golden plovers. Gone sunset coyotes and fog light ant ghosts and gone golden deer, fog frogs, and wishful panning shots. I have you in my mind, even if the images are gone. It's a hard blow. I"m bummed.
