I’ve taken many roadrunner photos in the almost 12 years we have lived in Tucson. This photo essay is representative of the images. Last October, Hugh Poland and I spent some time photographing wildlife in southern Arizona, and he was most disappointed in not seeing any Greater Roadrunners. However, he’s planning an August trip to attend a Tucson Audubon Societyevent here in southeast Arizona. So maybe he will see and photograph some roadrunners. (Click on any image to view it in a slideshow format.)
— kenne
The Ole Roadrunner
(For Sara from Uncle Johnny)
Want to tell you a story
Bout a bird that can run.
He can fly up in trees, but
To race is more fun.
He’s a runner at heart
He lurks like a trickster
Darts out on the road
Goes faster and faster.
He’s sleek, and he’s quick
Keep watch and don’t blink
Out he will jump
And be gone in a wink.
Not easy to catch
Roadrunners are wary
To chase is to fail
Ask Wile E Coyote’!
Birds like to sing
To cheep and to peep.
This one is different
He likes to Beep.
So when out in the car
Keep your eye on the road
If you see something running
It might be this Ole Bird.
Beep Beep!
— John Deen
Greater Roadrunner — Southeast Arizona Images by kenne
Red-bellied Woodpecker (Kingwood, Texas) — Image by Hugh Poland
Stary Sacz
A woodpecker in his red cap suddenly brought back the stationmaster in Stary Sacz. Over the station rose a little town, that is, an enormous market and convent of Poor Clares; each house had one window holding jars of borscht and pickles.
The innkeeper’s daughter was so thin that she kept bricks in her backpack to outwit the wind when she crossed the viaduct above the train tracks. The wind never got her, but other elements weren’t idle, especially Nothingness and her rich suitor, Mr. Time.
Robert Pinsky wrote in The New Republic: “[In the poetry of Adam Zagajewski] the unmistakable quality of the real thing–a sunlike force that wilts clichés and bollixes that categories of expectation– manifests itself powerfully . . . Like a fish breaking water . . . the achievement of these poems [“Without End”] is partly in that act of rising above a lived-in element. In Zagajewski’s work, the engulfing, ferocious historical reality appears as our habitat–not a well of horrors to be borrowed for rhetorical thunder, not an occasion for verse punditry, not a mere backdrop for sensibility. And the perception of that habitat has a mysterious, elating power.”
It’s not uncommon for March to have some high gusty winds here in Tucson. I didn’t find this nest at the base of the patio olive tree until a few days had fallen from the tree. For these baby birds, life was short-lived.
Winter Wren In Sabino Canyon — Photo-Artistry by kenne
“‘Hear! hear!’ screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, ‘winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it.'”