Birds, Movies, and the Dog

We're still in Winter: a cold snap, 15F, is predicted for the middle of the upcoming week.  

Meanwhile, we've been enjoying the comparatively balmy mid- to upper-forties.  Saturday, I went to the Cascades Raptor Center; the sun was direct and at a low angle, which always makes photography difficult.  I was able to photograph two resident birds outside of their aviaries:  Jake, a peregrine falcon,  and Taka, a swainson's hawk.  

The new thing I learned on this visit is that Eowyn, the ferruginous hawk, is aggressive about her food and is fed through the grating on her carrier.  Over the last two or so years that I've been visiting, the birds typically will alight on a perch or hover at a handler's direction for food; this was the first time I'd seen a bird strike at a falconer's glove.  It was yet another reminder that the center's residents are not tame pets. 

I suppose that some day I'll have to engineer a weekday visit to the center -- my intuition is that there's fewer visitors during the weekday, and a wider variety of resident birds are more likely to be outside of their aviaries for enrichment.  

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Saturday, Mark and I had the house to ourselves, so we watched the remake of "The Boys in the Band."  I'd seen and read excerpts of it way back in the eighties when I was at Reed, but never the whole play or movie.  It's supposed to be one of those things that Every Gay Man Should See.  We laughed at the witty repartee, especially at the beginning; but (most of) the characters became meaner (and more drunk) as the story progressed -- which did make me wonder why the characters spent time hanging out with each other.  I would have to agree with one review I'd read:  "a historic reminder of sadder times."  

While we were discussing the movie, Mark and I decided that "The Boys in the Band," "Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf," and to some extent, "The Lion in Winter," all have Dysfunctional Party Games in them.  We weren't sure if this was a reflection of party/cocktail society at the time, or if "contests as a means of self-discovery" was a theme of sixties culture.

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Sunday morning we took the Aoife out to Zumwalt Park.  The reservoir is still quite low; it feels like we could walk along the bottom of it all the way to the marina.  

I took my camera hoping for photographs of various raptors or waterfowl, but none put in an appearance.  So I took pictures of the dog among the violets instead (lightly lamenting that nature had pulled a mean trick on the violets and that in two days all the blooms would freeze to death).