aisyalam

I meant to mention that I saw a “Black-naped Oriole” (Oriolus chinensis) outside the rear window of our apartment yesterday. I’ve seen a few of these in the area before, but they’re usually in motion (or I am in motion when I see them) and I hadn’t gotten a good look at one until then. This bird – while eye-catching in its appearance - isn’t like the beautiful, sleek Baltimore orioles that sometimes strikingly grace our backyard in Frelinghuysen. No, the Black-naped version of the bird is much larger, mostly covered with yellow feathers – in fact in a lot of ways looks like a crow with yellow feathers. Amy and I are amateur ornithologists, and among the first books we bought here was a copy of Birds of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore. When I looked the bird up in the book, I was charmed to see that its call is identified as, “a melodious four-note whistle, What the devil!.” So now this is for us the Noigandres bird (referencing through the concrete poets Pound’s Pisan Cantos, “Noigandres, eh, noigandres,/Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!”

The other great bird we’ve got a lot of out back (beginning at about 5:30 a.m.) is the “Black-capped Kingfisher” – which is a beautiful blue bird with a red beak. The really interesting thing about this bird is that it sounds exactly like the Kingfisher you might see sitting on a dock in an inlet in Falmouth, or Gloucester, but looks completely different. We also saw a “White-throated Kingfisher” this week, also very different looking, as well as a “Blue-tailed Bee-eater.” Yes, it is somewhat exotic here in aisyalam - & far from winter. Malay phrase of the day: “hati-hati” – we’re off to Melaka in a couple of hours, an old city my friend Jonathan Hall once described to me as “piracy capital of the world;” more on that & all else later…