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.
