A head like a heron, body like a wild turkey, flies thermals like a vulture, swims like a diver, but genetic analysis shows Anhingas match closer to families of cormorants and tropical boobies, and frigate birds.
Not a bird to easily mistake in the field, its name has been given to a trail in the Everglades National Park, FL. Inge captured this image in Costa Rica.
Family recipes are inherited like sepia photos of relatives who passed long ago, meant to savor the memories. None is more precious to me that a fruit cake. My last edition came out of the oven months before Christmas and has gently ripened from injections with high spirits (pictured).
But if someone calls you an ‘old fruitcake’, don’t consider it a compliment. They mean you are ‘as nutty as a fruitcake’, to coin another British expression. I plead that you don’t slur the venerable comfort food invented by an unsung hero in some baronial kitchen in the Middle Ages.
It is food with immense calorific value that nourishes the heart. If Captain Scott had not left his fruitcake behind at base camp in 1910, he might have brought his team safely home from the South Pole. The cake was rediscovered a few years ago and reburied in the ice with solemn ritual, so that others will find it when Antarctica thaws. It stands beside honey as one of the least perishable foods, owing to a high sugar and alcohol content and low moisture. NASA will surely provision it for the first manned flight to Mars.
But don’t confuse the British cake with faint-hearted European versions, called stollen and panettone. The trappist monks of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky sell a cake that’s a better imitation, but it still falls short of the original and what would qualify as a severe challenge for finalists in the Great British Baking Show.
I hear fruitcake virgins ask what’s so special in the recipe? I reply: hardly anything is left out. Flour from Canada, Sugar from the Barbados, Butter from Ireland, Oranges from Florida or Australia, Brandy from France, Eggs from New Hampshire, Raisons, Prunes, Apricots, and Walnuts from California, Cranberries from Wisconsin, Hazelnuts from Oregon or Turkey, Nutmeg and Allspice from Indonesia or Grenada, and Glace Cherries from Italy (or the Red Planet).
Not convinced? You think less is more? Then, you don’t get the point.
The cake is a model of a world as it should be at Christmas and always. Its ingredients come from everywhere—Red states and Blue, North and South, Western countries and Eastern—all blended to create a compatible whole and so innocent it might have been imagined in the Eden of Bakery. Oh, that human society was as united and proud to be called a fruitcake. Sadly, Johnny Carson of the Tonight Show was correct when he quipped, “There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.” Humanity rejects the gift.
Goofy looks make the Boat-billed Heron a character to remember.
A lucky sighting for Inge in Costa Rica as this is a shy, nocturnal bird and a permanent resident of tropical lowland swamps and mangroves. It captures shrimp and small fish by suddenly lunging with its broad bill open. Fishing in the dark is a rare art for a bird. Bill has large eyes to spot prey in the gloom and perhaps a bill sensitive to touch.
December is our heron month. More common than the Little Blue shown last week, the Green Heron is another summer resident that winters in Central America and the Caribbean where some stay the year round. It, too, is becoming less abundant.
Herons have the same attitudes as human fishermen—patient, watchful, meditative. This species resembles them even more as one of the few tool-using birds, using floating scraps of food or feathers to lure small fish.
Starved of spicy stories or constipated by covid, the British media wrote about Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s bad hair day. In a speech to business leaders, he lost track of the message and, presumably to preserve poise, he ad-libbed about Peppa Pig World.
The pink cartoon character has become wildly popular. A child’s father told the Guardian newspaper how young superfans rushed to meet Peppa in an Hampshire amusement park, looking like an audience with the Pope. Peppa is an English creation but has become a worldwide phenomenon, nowhere more popular than in China where 2019 was the Year of the Pig. A porcine celebrity was as unheard of as a pig that can fly. No longer.
Turning animals into cuddly cartoon characters helps to forget the reality of real lives under domestication and in factory farms. Millions of pigs are raised in climate-controlled sheds, never seeing sunlight before reaching their destiny as chops and sausages. Is there a more ignominious end for a beast credited with superior intelligence to dogs?
I admit complicity and guilty feelings when chops sizzle on my grill from an animal I never knew but who, under different circumstances, might have become a beloved pet (not indoors). Our ancestors probably had the same ambiguous feelings. Where I grew up, families used to keep a pig given a Christian name and fed on kitchen scraps until sentiment evaporated in the autumn when the slaughterman drove up. When I used to visit a slaughterhouse to collect research specimens, I closed my ears (eyes and heart too) to the heavy slump after the bolt shot. After casual flirtation with vegetarianism, my carnivorous appetite restored.
Our relationships with animals wheel between affection and respect versus insouciance and far worse. Dogs are man’s best friend, yet no other animal receives more abuse at home. A donkey carried Jesus into Jerusalem, but countless numbers suffered in mines and as beasts of burden. A conservation symbol and most popular wild animal in Britain, yet badgers are shot, gassed, and even baited with dogs in illegal pits. I could go on … except to add that it matters not just for the sake of fellow creatures but because culprits of inhumane treatment are more likely to be cruel to children and spouses as well.
Toxic masculinity (not exclusively male) is often responsible for violence against vulnerable creatures. It erupts from poor anger control and frustration, treating victims no better than other property and to remind them who is boss.
Matters are not so bad now, thanks to legislation bolstered by science that reveals even invertebrates can feel pain (see post on lobsters). We pay more attention to the welfare of pets than herds or flocks of animals. Compassion is diluted by number. We prefer not to think too deeply that meat, eggs, and dairy produce, neatly wrapped and hygienic, came from sentient creatures raised and sacrificed for us under conditions we tacitly accept.
Perhaps that distance explains why (I’m told) Peppa Pig eats bacon without a pricked conscience. Sad to think the iconic pig works only as an entertainer and has missed an opportunity to teach animal welfare to children.
Published August 2016
Published September 2015
Published September 2013
Roger musing about Peace with Nature 