The Evening

Now it is the evening. The sun has gone down. It is dark. I am not afraid.

I write to you from Floresville, a small town near San Antonio, Texas. I am at the coffeehouse in the strip-mall, as we call it. This part of town is infested with Grackles. For those of you elsewhere on the planet, I will explain. One Grackle is fine. But they come in flocks, huge flocks, tens of thousands. Their call is an unpleasant sound -- hence, "grackle." And of course their scat piles up odoriferously.

Grackles are a manifestation of ecological imbalance -- there are simply too many of them, whilst other bird species are in decline.

It is popular to blame all this on mankind, which is probably correct, but why don't we blame the Grackles too, and some of the other species? If we are not the supreme species, then we cannot be the only ones responsible for the foul winds blowing on the planet.

I talk to the animals. I didn't used to, this is a new thing for me, which began in the last year or so -- a desire to understand and communicate with animals. The real change came a few months ago, when a cricket flew into my aprtment and I befriended it, keeping it as a pet for six weeks, and we had many conversations. Mainly I used to sing to the little fellow, and he would look up at me, and we both wondered what was going on.