Tag: crows

Thursday’s Wandering Thoughts

Sunshine glistens, highlighting white clouds with plump blue and gray muscles, cutting through the chilly air like a friendly furnace. A Cooper’s Hawk judges the human traffic from a high-wire act. Three blackbirds start an overhead interaction from different compass points, pulling my attention with their fervor. Flying toward a central tree, they posture on naked branches. Intense chatter explodes. Stopping, I eavesdrop to see what I can learn. One spreads their wings, exposing large white coins on their wing’s bottom, and offers a short, shrill, impassioned speech that silences the others. The three depart in relative silence but flap away in the same direction. Some accommodation seems at hand.

Around the corner, a crow sits in a high bare oak branch, black against a blue sky, beaking on about his world assessments. Further on, a robin preaches from the top of a sagging brown wooden fence protecting a yard.

Spring might be coming, if you believe the bird gossip.

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Floofuzzle

Floofuzzle (floofinition) – 1. To silence an animal through sound, motion, treats, food, or intimidation. Origins: Late floofish, the United States, early 1990s.

In Use: “The trouble with floofuzzling Flowerpuss was she was hellasmart and immediately understood that if she threw a noisy flooftrum, Beth would shower her with treats to floofuzzle her.”

2. Anything that attracts and intrigues an animal. Origins: Middle English, 1528.

In Use: “Hearing something downstairs, Titus leaped up and barked up a storm, and then stood at the top of the staircase, staring down into the darkness, tilting his head to one way and then the other, ears flopping, as he attempted to solve the floofuzzle of the noise he thought he’d heard.”

Recent Use: “Crows seem to love a good floofuzzle, and are experts at figuring things out, even using sticks as tools in their problem solving.”

3. Actions or noises which animals make that confuses others. First used in mid-1950s.

In Use: “Boldly the little patchy white tabby marched up to the giant German Shepherd and delivered a swat on his black nose, causing him to draw back, floofuzzled. The dog seemed to be thinking, ‘What is this bold little creature? How did it get into the house? And what is that smell?'”

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Saturday Afternoon at the Cemetery

A couple flirted, giggled, and kissed on a blanket under the cemetery pines while a woman sat on a towel, eating an apple and reading, in a splash of sunshine twenty yards away. Dozens of grave markers from them, a trio of fawns bucked and gamboled. A pair of does ate while a grave majestic buck chewed in thought. A gray squirrel, egged on by cawing crows and jeering jays, chased another squirrel around and up trees and over headstones as a flock of wild turkeys tsked, sighed, and tutted.

It was a lively place to be, in the cemetery that day.

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