Bird Blogging

Here's another picture from the park Sunday, a common grackle showing off its most uncommon coloring amid the wintry neutrals, like Lady Gaga at an Amish prayer meeting.

I love the names of birds almost as much as I love the birds themselves: kestrels, towhees, vireos. No one borrows those names for anything else; they mean what they mean. Their birds own them.

And then there are grackles. Grackle. It sounds like a symptom that you'd describe to your doctor: "And when I wake up in the morning I have this awful grackle." Or a new product at Home Depot, a combination of grout and spackle, something that you'd want to be very careful not to inhale or get on your bare skin. But it means a beautiful iridescent blackbird, and that's all it means, and it's such a blunt lumpy name I don't think anyone will ever be rushing to borrow it.