Saturday morning is special.
On weekday mornings, our walks occur under cover of darkness. I listen to my iPod as we make our way along the familiar, darkened route. On Saturday, however, we sleep in and begin our walk as the sun is rising. With the coming of spring the birds have returned, and they greet the dawn with song. On Saturdays I walk without iPod and rely on the cheeps and tweets, the chirps and the twitters, for my musical accompaniment. Their happy sounds make the morning a bit more glorious.
Guam’s snake infestation is giving Hawaii the heebie-jeebies. If a pregnant brown snake, or a mating pair of snakes, hitched a ride on a boat and landed in the snakeless Hawaiian Islands, Hawaii’s beautiful bird population — which has no fear of snakes — could be decimated.
The U.S. government has come up with a drastic solution to Guam’s brown snake problem. It will drop dead mice laced with painkillers over the island’s jungles. The theory is that the brown snakes will eat the mice and die by the score. Presumably, the government has some reason to believe that other mice-eating creatures won’t gobble down the tainted mice.
The yellow-bellied birds of Cocobay are hungry . . . always hungry.
Suddenly another bird appears, then another, then another. Before you know it, there’s a storm of bright yellow birds nibbling at every plate, crumb, and ice cream bowl on the abandoned table, with wings beating furiously as they fly back and forth after retrieving a scrap and scarfing it down. They eat as much as they can before a server comes over to clear the table and shoo them away.
Every March 15 buzzards — also known as turkey vultures — 
I first heard the storm when it was well off to the west. I had our windows open to enjoy some fresh evening air and was awakened by the distant growl of thunder. As I lay in bed and saw the later lightning flashes, I counted “one-one thousand, two-one thousand” until I heard the thunder, as I had been taught to do as a child, to get a sense of how far away the storm was. Soon enough the storm was directly upon us, with the brilliant lightning strobes followed instantaneously by ear-splitting cracks and the house lashed by heavy drops of rain. As the thunderheads receded into the east I dozed off, only to be reawakened by another line of oncoming stormclouds with their bolts and booms. By the time the second storm was over, it was time to get up for good and walk the dogs.
