The feathered dinosaurs are at it again

You've gotta love birds in spring. Their instincts kick in while it's still winter, and you'll come upon some poor befuddled starling holding a piece of string in its beak and wondering what the hell it's supposed to do with it. Then they "get it", and the grand competition for nesting sites begins. The air conditioning vents of my building are obviously prime real estate. So are the holes in cast-iron light posts around the District. So is the back of the NASM satellite dish, which every year hosts a family of yammering fledglings. For weeks, the city is aflutter with birds taking out short-term mortgages.

Then, at the same time as the cherry trees, the birds discover sex.

It was just a few days ago, as I was pulling on my socks, that I became conscious of a great commotion on my bedroom windowsill. I'm on the fifth floor of a five-story building, and my windowsills have always been prime bird territory. But usually they flee if they sense any motion behind the glass.

These two didn't flee. I probably could have fetched my camera and recorded the whole performance. But that would have been rude -- a pair of English sparrows was busy consummating their marriage. It didn't take too much anthropomorphism to add the dialog:

He (hopping off, panting, peering expectantly at Her): "Was it
good for you too?"
She (crouching and waggling her tail): "More! More! More,
please!"
He (hopping back on, still panting, doing his very best): "Well, all right, then...."

This continued for three or four cycles until She had been satisfied. Then She was off, without even a word or a shared cigarette. It didn't take too much anthropomorphism to think that He was disappointed.

Last night a robin sat at the very top of a tree in the middle of a construction site (the tree saved for future landscaping, surrounded by rubble and bulldozers), warbling his soul out, head tipped back as if he was drinking the fulvous sky. He was there again tonight.

The passing office-workers saw me stopped there, and one by one they followed my gaze. "It's so beautiful," said a woman with a briefcase. "He was there last night," I told her. It's a small thing, but to this one small beauty I can bear witness.

Runan-Shah, the merman of the Caspian

Loch Ness has its monster, the Orkneys have selkies, Feejee has its mermaid. And the Caspian Sea has Runan-shah, a cryto-humanoid that sounds somewhat like the classic Creature From the Black Lagoon:

All the eyewitness accounts provide a similar description of the marine humanoid. His height is 165-168 cm, he has a strong build, a protruding ctenoid stomach, his feet are pinniped and he has four webbed fingers on either of his hands. His skin is of moonlight color. The hair on his head looks black and green. His arms and legs are shorter and heavier than those of a medium-built person. Apart from his fingernails, he has nails growing on the tip of his aquiline nose that look like a dolphin's beak. No information as to his ears. His eyes are large and orbicular. The mouth of the creature is fairly large, his upper jaw is prognathic and his lower lip flows smoothly into the neck, his chin is missing.

This creature has been seen repeatedly by Caspian fishermen from Iran and Azerbaijan over the past few years. They speculate that he is one of a family of mermen on a mission to tackle the environmental problems of the Caspian sea.