Outpatient physical therapy started this afternoon. Jessica, my new physical therapist, professed amazement at how well I’m doing so soon after the accident. I was chuffed. Then she handed me off to her helper, who had me do exercises, after which I was less chuffed. Then the helper asked me to fill out a survey, assigning degrees of difficulty to various activities.
How hard is it, the survey inquired, to move from one room to another? No problem. To go up and down stairs? Not hard at all. To pick up something heavy from the floor? Haven’t thought heavy lifting would be smart. To run? Excuse me? To turn quickly while running? To hop? Nearly half the questions on the survey were of this nature. Don’t know how helpful my completing the survey was for the PT staff, but it certainly served to deflate me.
My husband and I went to Zukey Lake Tavern for dinner afterward. The food was pleasant, but the part of Zukey Lake we like best is the drive there and back. On the way to the restaurant, we saw a field full of turkeys. On the way back, we spotted some deer. When we were almost home, the low evening light was pretty much perfect. So we decided to park by Thurston Pond and see what we could see. We got the binoculars out of their compartment in the car and tried to make sense of the details that were still visible as the sun slid down the sky.
“What’s that out in the middle of the pond?” I asked my husband. “What does it look like?” he countered, trying to figure out what I meant. “A conglomeration of bird-shaped lumps,” I responded. “Oh,” he said, peering through the binocs, “that’s a stump with a bunch of birds sitting on it.”
“They don’t look like geese,” he added helpfully. We took turns adjusting the focus of the binoculars, trying to make sense of what we saw. There was less and less light. I maintained that I could see a bufflehead-type patch of white but, without being able to focus on any outlines of the bird in question, I couldn’t commit to an ID. “I don’t see any bufflehead,” my sweetheart said.
Blackbirds took to the trees in ones and twos, settling in for the night. A great blue heron flew over, on its way to do the same. Swallows in their numbers stayed on duty, swooping back and forth over the pond. At last, one of the bird shapes detached itself from Stump Central and motored away. The last of the light illuminated its head, showing both shape and color. The bird had a wild russet crest. Aha! A female hooded merganser. That meant the white-patched bird we’d seen earlier was most likely a male hooded merganser. Quite the treats in the waning light.
Or any other time. The first time I saw a hooded merganser on Thurston Pond, my husband and I were coming down the easement steps with our little girl, walking her to Thurston Elementary. Suddenly, from out of sight underwater, up popped a merganser with a goldfish in its beak. And just as suddenly, a gull dived from the sky, grabbed the fish out of the other bird’s mouth, and flew away for a double play
“Did you see that?” I asked the family. “See what?” they asked. The fish-to-duck-to-gull sequence had happened so quickly that they’d missed it.
It used to be pretty routine to see water fowl flying around our area with goldfish in their mouths. Someone or probably more than one someone had at some point released unwanted goldfish into Thurston Pond, and the bright fish had multiplied there. It was not unusual to see an egret standing on its long legs in the water dart its beak into the murk and come up with a squirming bit of gold to tip down its gullet. Or a heron flying over, legs dangling and a glint of gold flashing in its beak.
One winter, I saw a swirling orange ball through the ice on the pond–a mass of goldfish. It’s been years since I’ve seen even a single goldfish in the pond, though. They seem to have run their cycle, and that’s a good thing. Goldfish shouldn’t be released into the wild. Better we should see them in the conservatory pond at the botanical gardens. All the same, one reflects as baseball season finally gets underway, it’s good to keep your eyes open around Thurston Pond. You might see mergansers. Or Tinker to Evers to Chance.
8 April 2022
I had to look up the basball reference. While I remember learning lots of duck and bird names around the pond…I can’t actually bring to mind a single bird flying with a fish. I now wish I’d paid more attention for moments like that.