urbpan | The Suburban Pantheist

This past Sunday I visited my dad, with the help of

belen1974's car (I'm taking care of it for her while she's visiting her family), and in the company of my dog, Charlie. My dad lives in Connecticut, in a suburb of Springfield, Mass.

Some nice naturey things happened, that I do not have photographs of, but some nice photographs do follow this text, if you are interested.

While driving through Springfield, I observed many "starling balls." These are cohesive groups of European Starlings that fly around, looking much like schools of fish. At one point, a starling ball drifted into the highway, right into my path. I wondered how strong the birds' instinct to follow one another was, compared to the instinct to get out of the way of a fast moving object. As it turned out, they dispersed with dramatic flair, nanoseconds before decorating my friend's car.

Later on, on my back through Springfield, I saw the largest group of crows flying to roost that I have seen in years. This time of year, crows gather at night in huge numbers, partly, it is thought, for "protection in numbers" and partly for social reasons (For example, a heavy crow may attract attention, because it clearly has been eating well. Other crows may follow it in the morning, to see what it knows.) There were several hundred, and they were spread over dozens of trees over a mile or more. Many were perched for the night and streams of dozens more stretched off into the horizon.

Sadly, the small farm-turned-suburb town that my dad lives in continues to be developed at a steady and apparently increasing rate. "That development back there is where we saw the beaver tracks," my father said of a swamp that had sprouted a row of identical McMansions.

We went to Sunrise Park, a wooded park with a small lake in the town I grew up in. All I remember from when I went there as a kid is swimming in the lake, and once finding a 5 or six inch long spotted salamander. It was beautiful there this past sunday, though gray and dead. The fungi and mosses were conspicuous, and Charlie found a pair of white-tailed deer. Wanna see some pictures now?