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Posts Tagged ‘Anhinga’

Quotes to Inspire

Posted in Art, Birds, Journeys, tagged , , , , on November 28, 2018| 6 Comments »

 

Painting from a photo I took on the Anhinga Trail in the Everglades. — Watercolor by Pat Bean

“We don’t need to share the same opinions as others, but we need to be respectful. — Taylor Swift

Or Disagree with

I came across this quote by Rita Mae Brown — “A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it’s better than no inspiration at all” – while drinking my cream-laced coffee this morning. My instant reaction was to disagree with Rita Mae.

Deadlines, which I had almost daily as a newspaper journalist for 37 years, are my best, and most favorite, writing inspiration. They mean I have a writing job. I also think I do my best work when scrambling to meet a deadline.

I collect quotes. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t write one down in my journals. I want to remember the best of them because their words inspire me, make me laugh, or speak one of my own truths to me in better words than I’ve yet thought out.

But as this old broad gets wiser, I’ve come to question whether some of the more popular quotes are actually true, especially ones that indicate animals have no feelings or reasoning. How do we know the lark is happy, or the owl wise?

The years have taught me that I can’t believe – or agree with – everything I read. It’s a skill that I treasure in the age of the Internet, where anyone can say anything and everything they want, which is not a bad thing unless what they say is malicious.

Meanwhile, the beauty of Rita Mae’s quote is that a deadline isn’t everybody’s favorite thing, and it truly is a negative inspiration for them. In this, as in most things in life, how one looks at deadlines is neither right nor wrong, simply different.

Taylor Swift says it perfectly.

Bean Pat: Baltimore orioles

https://belindagroverphotography.com/2018/11/28/baltimore-oriole-two-photographs-2/?wref=pil  To brighten your winter day. I write about seeing my first Baltimore oriole in Travels with Maggie.

Pat Bean is a Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder. Her book, Travels with Maggie, is now up on Amazon and would make the perfect Christmas gift for anyone who likes to travel. Bean is currently writing a second book, which she is calling Bird Droppings, and which is about her late-bloomer birding adventures. You can contact her at patbean@msn.com

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Technology Miracles and Boo-Boos

Posted in Birds, Books, Favorite Places, Nature, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , , , , on January 26, 2012| 6 Comments »

“If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

I found Estero Llano State Park in Welasco, Texas, the old-fashioned-way, with a map. I'm not sure how the anhinga found its way here. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

I was in Dallas, returning from taking my daughter to work so I could use her car for the day. All I had to do to get back home was follow the GPS map installed on the dashboard of her Toyota Highlander.

But I decided I wanted to get a different view of the map. Silly me. As I’m sure you have already guessed, I pressed the wrong button and lost everything on the screen — and couldn’t get it back.

Because I had depended solely on the GPS to get me from one place to the next, I was confusingly lost with morning rush-hour traffic zooming all around me.

I was fortunate that I eventually came to a landmark I recognized and, although it took an extra 40 minutes, I did eventually get back to my daughter’s house.

I then used a map, and my own handcrafted cheat-sheet of right and left turns, to complete the day’s errands and to find my place back to pick up my daughter from work later that day.

The truth is that I’ve had to be pulled, while screaming, into most technological changes. I was one of the last to finally get a cell phone, and it was only this past Christmas, and only because it was a gift from my son, that I got a “smart” phone.

On the other hand, I was one of the first to get a home computer. After using one at work to write my newspaper stories, I found using a typewriter for my personal writings impossible.

Without GPS, Monarch butterflies, like this one I found at Quintana Neotropic Bird Sanctuary on Texas' Gulf Coast, migrate annually between Mexico and Canada, although it may take three generations to complete the journey. -- Photo by Pat Bean

My first computer didn’t even have a hard drive. Everything ran from floppy disks. And the word-processing program on it came with a black screen and green type, or you could make the type orange.

Today, I can’t imagine life without my computer and the Internet. Such a thought sounds barbaric.

Ditto life without my Kindle, which was also a gift and which I’ve now had for a year. I thought I would miss the feel of a real book in my hand, but I haven’t. I think the fact I can be reading almost any book I want almost instantly is a miracle – well until I discover how much I’ve spent at Amazon each month.

I still haven’t got a GPS, however. My canine traveling companion, Maggie, and I still use maps, albeit it computer ones, to find our way across the country.  It seems a GPS might be as difficult for me to use as an electric can opener, which is why I still use a manual one. 

But I’ve got a Twitter account, maggieandpat. And when I announced it, my oldest granddaughter laughed and said: “Who would have thought it would take my Nana to make me get a Twitter account?” 

Her comment made this wandering/wondering old broad feel young – well at least until a pain in one of my joints announced a change in the weather.

Bean’s Pat: Vimeo: My Friend Maia by Julie Warr http://vimeo.com/31733784 A video to inspire all us old broads, and perhaps those still young among us, too.

 

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Some Things Actually Are Impossible

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged , , on April 3, 2010| 1 Comment »

 

An anhinga trying to swallow a fish too large for its throat. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“Letting go doesn’t mean giving up, but rather accepting things that can not be.” — Author unknown

I’m not a quitter. That’s mostly a good thing. But sometimes you have to admit you can’t reach the top of a mountain, fix a bad marriage or write a perfect piece of prose. So you come back down the mountain before you die; you move on with your life while you still have a bit of sanity left; and you send your imperfect article off to a publisher and begin a new piece of writing.

I watched an anhinga, while hiking the Anhinga Trail in Everglades National Park with my granddaughter, Keri, that might have taken this advice to heart. When we came upon the bird it was perched on a limb above a shallow pool of water trying to swallow a fish too large for its thin neck. We stood there and watched it for a full 30 minutes as it attempted this task.

Several times the fish fell back into the water. The anhinga would dive after it, spear it with beak, come back up to its perch and once again maneuver the fish head down into the opening of its throat. When Keri and I finally gave up watching and moved on, the anhinga was still at what just might have been one of those impossible tasks.

A cormorant and turtles keep a watch beside the Anhinga Trail in the Everglades. -- Photo by Pat Bean

A cormorant and turtles keep watch beside the Anhinga Trail in the Everglades. Photo by Pat Bean

There’s much to see along this popular trail that winds for nearly a mile through a sawgrass marsh full of wildlife. From the trail’s elevated boardwalk, one can almost reach out and touch cormorants, great blue herons, turtles and even alligators that call the area home.

The anhingas, which give the trail its name, are particularly populous. It is sometimes called the snake bird because its low profile in water often leaves only its long-necked head visible.

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