For the love of a dog in a cold city

I’m not a dog-lover.  I avoid them whenever possible, a strategy developed over a late childhood spent delivering the Vancouver Sun newspaper six days a week.  The oversized canvas bag I used to stuff with about 28 papers every day had SUN in huge, black letters written on the side.  Dogs in my hometown read it as: BITE ME.

Eleven times in five years they sunk their fangs into my flesh by the time I turned 13 and passed the paper route on to a 10-year-old kid eager to be a moving canine chomping post in exchange for pocket money.

I was thinking of my attitude to dogs while strolling through the bitterly cold streets of Paris with my friend.  Paris is notorious for its dogs and the tonnes of crap they dump every day.  As he scraped a freshly laden smear off his heel one afternoon, I consoled my friend by telling him a visit to Paris wouldn’t be complete without glitching at least once through a fragrant pile of crotte de chien.

Then on our last day of serious walking my friend and I came across a white sheet of paper thumb-tacked to a tree.  We stopped and read the first few lines, and, because we realised how much of an honest cry from the heart we’d randomly stumbled upon, we read it to the very end.

The lines on that anonymously posted sheet of paper recall classic themes, and they won’t turn me into a dog-lover, but I think I’ll never forget how I came across them, and know I’ll look on dog owners in a different light from now on.

A dog creates bonds – hommage to Lumie and to dog-owners.

Lumie died at the age of 6, brutally ending a close, three-year relationship with the author of these lines.  Three years during which the novice I was in the subject discovered the special friendship which can bond a man to a dog.  Three years that allowed me to get to know other dog-owners, strollers of all ages with whom contact forms with an astounding spontaneity in a city such as Paris where a general distrust of strangers prevails.

I also often came across former dog owners who would not hesitate to crouch down and tell of their sorrow when their companion had left them – a great sadness that, quite often, they still felt a long time after.  Some had not yet “grieved” as the saying goes. They had tears in their eyes as they spoke of their vanished animal, especially if it resembled mine.

There was a time when everyone made fun of “these grannies and their little doggies.”  But in talking to those holding a leash you come to realise the irreplaceable role of a companion a dog can be to isolated men and women.   One day a woman said to me, “she’s my baby” when speaking of Pim, a beautiful German Shepherd that was said to have once been in a police squad sniffing out narcotics.

Often the owner would talk in glowing terms of the absolute loyalty their dog afforded them that a human companion would be incapable of showing.  They’ll also talk of their intelligence and ability to understand so many things without aid of a translator.  A lot is said through a certain look, by their impressive capacity to interpret the most trivial of your movements and gestures.

All this I was able to find in Loulou, a little white Pomeranian born five years ago in Pennsylvania and brought home from New York with my luggage in 2008.  His first owner, a Taiwanese lady who was learning French, had named him Loumi, a nickname from the French word for light: lumière.  My daughter wrote He’ll be an angel dog on learning of his death from an incurable disease.

These personal revelations might seem quite laughable at a time when the Syrian regime pursues its massacre of an insurgent populace fed up with decades of tyranny, where Tibetans set themselves on fire to protest Beijing’s colonial brutality, where Europe’s destitute are dying every day of cold and the people of Greece slowly sink into poverty.  You might tell me it’s a lot of sorrow for such a little dog, a silly little thing.  There are surely greater sorrows.  Nevertheless, they don’t erase this one.

hamster flashback

Socke was a nice enough hamster.  Couldn’t skateboard worth a crap though.

A bird in the house

When you come across a bird that doesn’t fly away, what do you do?

Today I found the most beautiful bird on our front landing. It was a small, frail-looking creature with delicate, powder-blue feathers on its head and wing, yellow on the breast and streaked with black and white.  It was awake and standing but quite still, as if it were stunned from flying into the glass.

I knew I shouldn’t be picking up a bird and bringing it indoors, but I thought if I kept it safe from a marauding feline long enough for it to recover and fly away on its own, no harm done.

As I bent down to pick it up, a line from a book we read in 2nd-year Canadian Literature class came back to me: A bird in the house means a death in the house. I’m not superstitious, so the thought was only fleeting, and besides: that was something else.  The character in the Margaret Laurence story says an errant bird flying into an open window is a bad omen.  This isn’t the same thing.  I’m bringing it inside.  It’s my decision.

I cupped it gently and shouldered the door open, noticing how still the bird was.  It wasn’t even twitching.  I wondered what kind it was, too.  Later K. told me it was a Blaumeise in German.  So much more beautiful a name than blue tit, don’t you think?

Once upstairs and inside, I set it on the kitchen table and picked at a piece of bread to make some crumbs to lay before it.  Thinking it might be a good idea to close the sliding door to the kitchen just in case, I turned around to do so and in that very moment the bird for the first time came to life, fluttering around in circles and landing atop the shelving above the counter opposite the oven.

So I stood on a chair and climbed up onto the counter with some more breadcrumbs, but just as I reached up to lay them at its feet it flew away again, this time to a far top corner of the kitchen.  Because it was so high I could no longer see it, I went downstairs to fetch the stepladder, but when I returned, it was gone.

Or so I thought.  Because as I was setting up the ladder I thought I heard a rustling sound from behind the built-in cabinets just to the left of the fridge.  Damn.  Somehow the bird had flown into a space about a foot wide and three inches deep reaching all the way down to the floor – perhaps the worst place in the house for it to go.

While angling a flashlight and mirror in an awkward attempt to find it I thought: this is the death in the house.  That bird is going to die, trapped behind the shelving because there is no way to dismantle the built-in kitchen without tearing it apart.

I pulled away the flashing that runs along the bottom of the cabinets to try to find a way up behind the shelving from underneath, but the way was sealed shut.  More fluttering and rustling from behind the shelves.  Was it going to hurt itself?

Just as I was contemplating how long I should wait before hacking through the back of the shelving to free an escape route up he flew.  He perched for a minute before flying off and hitting the window – probably for the second time within an hour – and then fell to the floor.  I picked him up, opened the window and off he flew.

I won’t be bringing home any more birds anytime soon.

Flashback: hummingbird in hands

Migrating cranes in northern Germany

Lofty

 

 

 

Ensemble

 

 

Formation

 

 

Migration

 

Hunger

 

Searching

 

Space

 

Flight

 

 

to

 

 

warmth

 

 

and

 

 

Freedom

Hamburg Spring Derby: more than just horses jumping around

I’m really grateful to our daughter for introducing us into the world of horses.  She’s got a horse to take care of at nearby stables, sharing his care with two other girls and getting riding lessons on him three times a week.  I show up when I can to poke around, take a few photos, and marvel at what I can discover about a creature that always belonged to another world.

Today I went a little step further into equestrian culture, tagging along with wife K and the little red-haired girl to the Spring and Dressage Derby, an 80-year-old Hamburg tradition.  We rode our bikes through the sunshine, bought some standing-room tickets, met the girl’s friends, found a spot on the shady side, and settled in to watch the jumping.

I’d watched riding on TV and always found it a bit boring.  Unless you’re there, you don’t feel the thud of the hooves pounding the grass, see the puffs of dirt kicked up, hear the horses snorting, the riders shouting, the crowd falling silent as as the horse approaches that final hurdle, then bursting into roars of approval as a rare perfect ride comes to an end.

They billed it as the most difficult course in the world, 1200 metres with 17 obstacles including two water jumps, three back-to-backs obstacles, and a frightening, near-vertical wall that led to the disqualification of at least a half-dozen riders as their horses went twice to the brink and balked.

This rider went down the wall and through the course beautifully, despite losing points for knocking over a couple of bars.  If you listen carefully, you can pick up wife K’s commentary.

Note to self: pick up that HD video camera you’ve been wanting ASAP.

I’ve not used the wordpress photo gallery feature yet.  Maybe it’s time.  Here goes:

Hamburg hinterland who’s who: the birds

The Hamburg Tree-sitting Eagle-Eyed Hawk-Nosed Falcon Bird of Prey:

The Hamburg Parkside Focus-Challenged Great Squawking Pheasant:

Hamburg Yellow-beaked Balcony-Crapping Blackbird

Please note that I haven’t the slightest clue what kind of birds these are.  Hell, I can’t even differentiate between a cat and a dog or tell whether a woman is wearing a swimsuit or not.  But the blackbird sings beautifully,  and I’m looking forward to spotting a pheasant in Jenisch park once it warms up.  Enjoy.

How we nearly tripped over a headless snake that had swallowed a dog whole

An item I saw on some forum somewhere reminded me of a hike I took one day in Hong Kong.

Seems a dog in Australia let himself get too cozy with a python and ended up in the belly of the beast:

It does happen from time to time.

Not long after arriving in Hong Kong I was on a hike with my girlfriend in the Sai Kung Country Park, one of the few large patches of oceanside greenery remaining in that crowded little spot.

We had just disembarked at the last bus stop and were walking along a sidewalk on the last strip of road before the trailhead, when Amy let out a SHRIEK and jumped off the curb.

Most of it was in the bushes in shadow, but getting closer and hauling it out by the cord to get a better look, here’s what we saw:

I still don’t know what happened to the snake’s head, but we think it might have been sawed off for stuffing as a souvenir by the same person who wrapped a rope and dragged it to the place we found it.

Nearly tripping over a headless, 2.5-metre snake with a dead dog’s legs sticking out isn’t everyone’s idea of the ideal way to begin a hike, but after we’d gotten over the initial shock and taken a few pictures, we pulled the carcass back into the bushes and carried on.

Update: Reader Amanda left a comment saying that’s no dog!  By the look of the tapered tail, the delicate feet and retractable claws, it’s a CAT.

brushing up on my horse sense

I never knew there were so many ways to brush a horse.

But this girl does:

In fact, I never knew much at all about horses, but now after watching her take care of them before and after her lessons, brushing them down, cleaning out the hooves, hauling the saddle on and off, making sure the stall’s clean and a dozen other jobs to get done before she can go home, I’m getting to know how much work they are.  Good thing she’s crazy about them.

We’ve recently gotten her into a set-up where she shares the care of one horse with two other girls.  She gets three riding lessons a week and can go to the stables anytime to feed it, take it out for a walk, or just hang out.  The stables are about half-way between home and school, which works out well for managing both.

She’s got a riding tournament coming up this weekend.

We’re all excited.

Wish her luck!

Watch out for bird-watchers watching bird porn

Our crack reporting team at Definitely Not the Daily News is back from the Beijing Olympics just in time to bring us a startling revelation about starlings, seed, and doing it in the bushes.

by Aywatsa Madder

Denver (DNTN) They may look like an innocent elderly couple dressed in tweed, felt hats and rubber boots out for a day of bird-watching, but they may have more in mind than hoping for a rare glimpse of a pair of Great Tits.

According to the authorities at stopbirdporn.org, a lot of bird-watchers are out there not to watch the birds, but to watch the birds go at it.

“Basically they go into the woods with binoculars and they watch birds mate,” said stopbirdporn organiser Olga Fochyaself in a Definitely Not the Daily News Youtube exclusive interview during the group’s protest march at the Democratic Convention. “Some species are sensitive to that and they’re being endangered by being watched while mating. Plus those older people, they make porn, and if you google “bird porn” on the internet, you’ll find a lot of it. And it’s growing.”

Behind-the-scenes reaction gleaned from underground sources beneath the post in the comments revealed a surprisingly sober reaction to the campaign.

“You guys are nuts,” said one punctuationally challenged birwatcher. “I have been watching birds for years and never saw any mating,and if I did, it would not turn me ,or any normal person on. the person responsible for this website and any real ads should be locked up in the nut house.”

Birdman went further:

I like looking at birds. The other day I saw 2 toucans getting it on on the Discovery Channel. The size of those beaks made my toes curl and made my hair stand on end. It was such a beautiful thing and I wish I could have taped the footage. I’m looking at Kiwis now! So kiss my bird lovin ass, bitches!

Perhaps you could help this guy out:

To all the above posters,
I’m Gabe Oppenheim, a Washington Post writer currently considering a story about this “movement.” I’d like to interview people who have been handed flyers or have witnessed the protests. My office phone number is 202-334-6367. Please don’t hesitate to call (and to leave a message, if I’m away from my desk). I appreciate your help.
Best,
Gabe

And finally, one commenter seems to have hit the nail on the head:

We found this in the Express newspaper this morning, we are pretty sure this is a prank, or some lame form of viral marketing, where the product will be revealed to us eventually.

Talking about dead sheep with an 11-year-old

On holiday in southern Germany last week the little red-haired girl and I are cycling a long, slow, straight line uphill through cornfields, plum and apple orchards, vineyards and pasture on the way to her horse-riding lesson. Brought up on the flatlands of northern Germany she wimps out on anything above a 2% grade, so we had a lot of time to get a good long look at the herd of sheep munching and bleating away on the left.

One of them wasn’t doing much munching or bleating. Actually, he was more or less sunning himself, flat on his back in the centre of the field.

Looks like that sheep’s out to get a tan instead of a meal, I tell her.

You mean the one in the middle there?

Sure, that one there lying on its back. You know what, it hasn’t moved a bit since we first saw it. Maybe it’s dead?

It could be. They say that if a sheep lies on its back, the weight of the internal organs pushes on to the heart so much, it stops beating.

Really? Aw come on, don’t gimme that! Where did you hear a thing like that?

I read it in Wendy.

Wendy? But that’s a horsie magazine for girls! (starting to get giggly together now) What on earth are they doing talking about sheep in a horse magazine?

I don’t know, you can look it up when you get home.

But you’ve got about 500 of them back home you picked up for two euros at that flea market. What, I’m supposed to find the one page in the whole stack of Wendies that talks about dead sheep? (Adopting squeaky professorial voice.) Wendy’s Fun farm fact! A sheep will die if it lies on its back.

Stop it! (She nearly falls of the bike.)

Maybe I could look it up in the Enyclopedia of Dead Sheep we packed along with our toothbrushes and combs?

STOP IT!

Stop what?

Stop being funny! I can’t ride!

OK. But seriously, can that be true? And anyway, why would a sheep roll over onto its back in the first place?

I don’t know. But I’m sure I read it somewhere.

Maybe it only happens to really fat ones.