A tea party at the water’s edge:
white toupee, red waist-coat;
would you pass the sugar, please?
Today I return with two white-capped redstarts I observed last August in impeccably dapper finery in the Himalayas. Redstarts are fascinating to watch: they wait at the side of streams, and then without warning submerge themselves wholly in the water, staying under for such a time one cannot imagine surfacing – and yet, in the end, there they are, some hapless insect struggling in their beak. In their daily immersement in the water, perhaps their repeated emergence is holiest of all.
somewhere up a tree 