Evolution of compassion on our back deck

Monday morning, Tina and I were sipping tea, eating some cereal and watching some birds at our bird feeder. One female who appeared to be a young adult seemed to be feeding two older females. She would find food either in the feeder or strewn in a flower basket and deliver it straight to the mouths of the ones who weren’t as agile.

We were stricken by the compassion shown by birds to each other.

Of course, these birds were female. The male flew up at one point and just took a slog for himself. Selfish jerk.

I got some shaky, handheld footage:

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Some quotes that caught my eyeballs and tickled my brain

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

— Goethe

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”

— Thoreau

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook