A few days ago I forgot to mention one of the big events of
the year – the return of the swallows and martins from Africa.
It was wonderful to see them, as ever, but I did feel sorry for the poor guys.
They’d just made the arduous 3-5,000 mile flight and landed straight in the
middle of an unusually cold, damp, dreary English spring.
The conditions did give me a treat today, though. The birds
were hunting only a few feet above the land, courtesy of low barometric pressure
keeping the flying insects down near ground level, so I was able to stand on
the lane and have these fast, agile, graceful birds swooping and swerving
around me at a distance almost close enough to touch. I like it very much when
that happens.
* * *
And on the subject of touching, I’ve noticed how tactile
children are. They have to touch everything to get the full pleasure and
information from what the eye describes inadequately. I’ve never grown out of
that need; I’ve just become more circumspect.
3 comments:
An experience of that sort with any animal or groups of animals is always an amazing feeling.
Before Liam was born i read a lot about how important it is for infants and babies to learn from touching things. And i see it on a daily basis. He has been learning new words and he watches our mouths while we talk to him and sometimes wants to touch our lips an faces while we talk. He will sometimes even move his little mouth while doing so and touch it, too. We've learned a lot about behavior and the learning process by watching Liam grow.
The thing about touching... for whatever odd reason i have this thing with wanting to smell stuff, lol. I'll take a sniff of something and not really think about it. Once while at work a coworker, a very sweet and shy but gorgeous girl, was watching me and i smelled an eraser and she giggled and said, "You're such a smelly little thing aren't you! I mean you like to smell things!" After that i try to be more aware of my smelling habits, haha.
Oh yeah, i just wanted to tell you this because i think its funny and you've mentioned how people have came to your blog via odd google searches... Someone came to mine after searching 'the Simon Prebble in my head' HAHA! So odd.
Also, i've noticed that Feedjit doesn't track all visitors. I have a lot showing up in the Blogger statistics that aren't on my Feedjit tracker. I was pleased to see i've had 75 visits from South Korea. Hmmmmm.
1) Sounds like a combination of a sensual nature and the Harris nose! (I did say 'nice nose' once, didn't I? Liam sounds fascinating and very with it.
2) I know; search terms are endlessly fascinating - quite unbelievable, some of them. Feedjit seems to pick up about 1 in 6 that Google gets, although Google misses some, too. You always appear in the Feedjit, but Google always misses you. And Google sometimes gets the coutries very wrong.
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