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urbpanThe Riverway is the park in front of my house. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cottonmanifesto and I have posted pictures of it nearly every week for the past couple years (I believe she has pictures of it up right now). It's a familiar place for us: we walk the dogs there every day, we had an Urban Nature Walk there this past weekend, and I wrote my first class assignment about it.
While we were walking the dogs there this morning, I expressed that I didn't think I wanted to write the next assignment about the place. We have to write a narrative, something interesting enough that there's a progression, a beginning, middle and end. The three pieces we read this past week are to be examples of the kind of writing we'll produce for this assignment. They were: a story about the first perilous boat ride through Grand Canyon, the violent geological history of the Sierra Nevadas, and the hunting and killing of a rogue wolf. Somehow my daily dogwalk doesn't seem to compare in my imagination.
Just as I had this thought, surrounded by the uncharacteristic sunshine and warmth of this November day, still bathed in the stained-glass patterns of the changing leaves, we came across the carcass of a male mallard. A hawk must have been feeding on it--it's body cavity had a neat hole carved out of it, and some meat and innards had been extricated. It took some effort to pull the smaller more hyper dog away from this exciting object. It will be interesting to revisit this small body behind a tree. Will the hawk return to take pieces from it; will it carry its treasure up to a tree? Will a mammalian scavenger such as a raccoon, or even a coyote (there are reports of coyotes in the Riverway, which we cannot authenticate) tear it to bits? Will an off-leash dog rip it apart before being scolded by its disgusted owner? Or will the slow process of decomposition take place through the agency of insects and bacteria, gradually reducing the bird's body to a skeleton matted with scant flocking?
And do my classmates really want to read about a dead duck?
cottonmanifesto and I have posted pictures of it nearly every week for the past couple years (I believe she has pictures of it up right now). It's a familiar place for us: we walk the dogs there every day, we had an Urban Nature Walk there this past weekend, and I wrote my first class assignment about it.While we were walking the dogs there this morning, I expressed that I didn't think I wanted to write the next assignment about the place. We have to write a narrative, something interesting enough that there's a progression, a beginning, middle and end. The three pieces we read this past week are to be examples of the kind of writing we'll produce for this assignment. They were: a story about the first perilous boat ride through Grand Canyon, the violent geological history of the Sierra Nevadas, and the hunting and killing of a rogue wolf. Somehow my daily dogwalk doesn't seem to compare in my imagination.
Just as I had this thought, surrounded by the uncharacteristic sunshine and warmth of this November day, still bathed in the stained-glass patterns of the changing leaves, we came across the carcass of a male mallard. A hawk must have been feeding on it--it's body cavity had a neat hole carved out of it, and some meat and innards had been extricated. It took some effort to pull the smaller more hyper dog away from this exciting object. It will be interesting to revisit this small body behind a tree. Will the hawk return to take pieces from it; will it carry its treasure up to a tree? Will a mammalian scavenger such as a raccoon, or even a coyote (there are reports of coyotes in the Riverway, which we cannot authenticate) tear it to bits? Will an off-leash dog rip it apart before being scolded by its disgusted owner? Or will the slow process of decomposition take place through the agency of insects and bacteria, gradually reducing the bird's body to a skeleton matted with scant flocking?
And do my classmates really want to read about a dead duck?
