Oversion’s Weblog

A week or two ago the Saturday of the rainbow after a storm, Denis Casun turned up in the lineup behind me at the beer store on Spadina so I waited for him outside in the photocopy shop doorwell, and got his picture coming out: 

Rather than hurry off in the sudden deluge it made sense to visit the historic Wickett and catch up on things with the first period of the hockey game.

According to him the so called Turkey Vultures I showed him on the camera’s little screen are new to Toronto. Denis always partly flummoxes with his certainties, and according to him there’d never been a turkey vulture sighted in Toronto until 2002. Triply hard to believe, he says there are just 3 turkey vultures in Toronto. As we normally do in mid intersection or passing by elsewhere we argued: I said that with birds you see them or not, the same one or another one, and if there’s any, there’s more than several, but he said no there’s three. He walks ten miles a day outdoors and talks to a ton of people, so I don’t discount what he knows. That strange though to have 3 turkey vultures fly over work this morning. 

It’s all lost terminology. They don’t resemble either turkeys or vultures. My father in the mid 1950s was station with the then royal Canadian Air Force in Ankara, working as liaisson between Turkish and American forces, and on his days off birdwatched, in the desert, mastering remaining still so that the vultures would come down to contemplate consuming him. At 3 feet he’d shoe them off. They were vultures, they lived in Turkey. We were sitting out in the yard in 1997 and one afternoon I saw this huge bird glide over the yard and we discussed at length, my impression it looked like a vulture, or a flying turkey, or stork even, and he said it must have been a turkey vulture. But it didn’t look like that, which I prefer calling Moose Hawks.

The skinny black cat by the way, the unwell looking one from last week, seems to have settled upon life in the Jehova Witness parking lot, neither truckbed dweller nor full ravine cat. He’s looking better, but it is still not an ideal situation.

The food I put all around the area last week
quickly put us back on the route of his uncle
the gem cat, whose shining coat and
bear-like size inspires hope: