Copycats
This was a wonderful, fun-filled weekend for our family of three. We had a lazy day on Friday, just hanging out here at home.... Yesterday we had my grandmother's 80th birthday celebration in the afternoon, and then last night we celebrated Ken's grandfather's birthday (whew!). Tonight was, of course, Superbowl XXXIV, and so we had a mini-party of sorts with some friends and a whole slew of pizza and chocolate chip bars. Mmmm....
Friday afternoon, beckoned by the welcomed warmer weather (and by warm, I am referring to can-we-make-it-to-sixty-degrees? kind of warm...), Ken and I bundled up Little G and took him to the pond to feed the ducks. Well, what we thought, anyway, was that we'd feed the ducks. We didn't expect to be baraged by an entire corp of some relatives of the sea gull....and by that, I mean nearly 50 of them swarming down over us like an Alfred Hitchcock film.
Gardner sat there in his stroller, fingers wide open, eyes alert, as if he were planning inwardly how to reach out and snatch one out of the air. I don't even know if he realized they were real....it was probably a very surreal experience for him to see so many strange creatures swirling in the air above his head.
Ken took pieces of the stale bread we brought and tossed them up into the sky....and one by one, the gulls swooped down and caught the morsels in their beaks, mid-air. It was quite entertaining.
The best part was witnessing how extremely smart, cunning, and devious these gulls have learned to become amongst all of these previously well-fed ducks. Seven or eight of the gulls assumed duck-like qualities....serenity, gentleness....wings tucked in tightly, gliding to and fro among the brown and mallard ducks, bobbing their heads just so. "Look at me, I'm a duck! I'm a duck!" they seemed to resonate to us. "Give me bread...I'm a duck!" How clever. Survival of the fittest, I suppose, if you want to think of it in that way....or at least, survival of the smartest. Those "pseudo-ducks" left with much fuller bellies than the ones overhead who performed acrobatically and bullied the ducks down below.
The early bird gets the worm....and the undercover bird gets the bread.
Friday afternoon, beckoned by the welcomed warmer weather (and by warm, I am referring to can-we-make-it-to-sixty-degrees? kind of warm...), Ken and I bundled up Little G and took him to the pond to feed the ducks. Well, what we thought, anyway, was that we'd feed the ducks. We didn't expect to be baraged by an entire corp of some relatives of the sea gull....and by that, I mean nearly 50 of them swarming down over us like an Alfred Hitchcock film.
Gardner sat there in his stroller, fingers wide open, eyes alert, as if he were planning inwardly how to reach out and snatch one out of the air. I don't even know if he realized they were real....it was probably a very surreal experience for him to see so many strange creatures swirling in the air above his head.
Ken took pieces of the stale bread we brought and tossed them up into the sky....and one by one, the gulls swooped down and caught the morsels in their beaks, mid-air. It was quite entertaining.
The best part was witnessing how extremely smart, cunning, and devious these gulls have learned to become amongst all of these previously well-fed ducks. Seven or eight of the gulls assumed duck-like qualities....serenity, gentleness....wings tucked in tightly, gliding to and fro among the brown and mallard ducks, bobbing their heads just so. "Look at me, I'm a duck! I'm a duck!" they seemed to resonate to us. "Give me bread...I'm a duck!" How clever. Survival of the fittest, I suppose, if you want to think of it in that way....or at least, survival of the smartest. Those "pseudo-ducks" left with much fuller bellies than the ones overhead who performed acrobatically and bullied the ducks down below.
The early bird gets the worm....and the undercover bird gets the bread.
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