uesday
12th
July Light WNW sunny intervals after one brief shower.
I spend the morning intermittently waking up, reading
and sleeping in turn. With no reason to rush as the ferry back to
Oban isn't until 17:40, I can relax and take the opportunity to get
into a philosophical and scientific book.
Looking out of the tent to the beach I wonder which
beaches in the World are considered the best. Bondi? Copacabana?
Surely neither of these can be as beautiful as this one and there
isn't a soul to be seen here. I have the whole area to myself.
I can still bird whilst inside the tent and I have a
list of four by the time I decide to get up; raven, meadow pipit,
wheatear and herring gull have all been calling, cronking or tacking
just outside the tent. One doesn't need to see them to know what they
are.
More plastic on this beach though and by default I
collect four large carrier bags of it and take them to the skip two
bags at a time. The reason for the double trip is that on reaching
the skip the first time I see that I have lost a pannier somewhere in
the sand dunes and going back to retrieve it I decide to collect some
more plastic.
On reaching the skip the next time I see I have lost my
cycling gloves and have to go back to search for them! Twit.
Whilst lying in bed this morning I was thinking about
various things from the past and I don't know why but a repetitive
ditty from the Reading Rock Festival days from the 1970s. That one
was about marijuana. I changed the words . . .
And he would pedal, pedal, pedal.
The Biking Birder.
He would pedal, pedal, pedal.
A little further
He would cycle in the rain,
Usually in some pain,
Up a hill, down a hill
Then get lost again.
And then he'd pedal, pedal, pedal,
A little further,
Until he saw the bird.
Give his pencil a lick,
And then put down the tick,
And then he'd pedal, pedal, pedal . .
One more time!
I had been thinking of the fundamental differences
between Carbon Twitchers, the more normal birder who uses a car or
airplane to get to the birds and my own Green Birding pursuit of the
same.
My birding is 99% perspiration with 1% inspiring
moments, to paraphrase Edison. Those moments though may come from
landscape beauty as well as natural moments. They can come from a
more intimate relationship with the environment than a Carbon
twitcher gets driving along the same roads.
A crazy bit of thinking away from all that involved
scale. There were a few midges in the tent this morning and I thought
of how immense I am compared to a midge. A crazy thought with large
error margins is that were a midge to be my size, I would be around
four kilometres high to keep the scale comparison going. I wonder
what the relative masses of us both would conjure up?
9.96
Miles 414 feet elevation up 448 feet elevation down
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