Leo

This weekend we’re in Napa for C’s birthday. We lounged by a river and a fire pit, binoculars in hand, listening and waiting for the birds to show themselves. Earlier that morning we had a falconry lesson with Daisy, a large, powerful peregrine; Kirby, a dainty Harris’s hawk; Hermes, another peregrine but loud as hell; and Hubert, aka Hoops, a spectacled owl who loves the couch and daytime TV more than flying around and being a fearsome nocturnal beast. <img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/hoops.jpeg" alt="A photograph of Hubert, aka Hoops, with his little beak open, waiting for a head scratch." /> Look at that little dinosaur! This weekend was lovely for many reasons but it was also a much needed escape from The Conversation. I spent a few days without podcasts talking about it or reading blog posts about it or hearing people lecture me about it and then instantly turn frustrated when I don’t engage with The Conversation in a way that pleases them. Instead, I lounged on the deck of our hotel thinking about birds and reading <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-dinosaurs-a-new-history-of-their-lost-world-steve-brusatte/de61a8287bbfd9ed?ean=9780062490438&next=t">The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World</a> by Steven Brusatte. With each page, Steven speed runs through aeons of geological time: mountain ranges and continents crack apart and rush together again, supersalamanders emerge, prosper for millions of years, and then disappear in a puff of smoke whilst sauropods take over the show, developing enormous lungs—like the birds in the trees outside our hotel room—and growing to eye-watering sizes such as the Argentinosaurus, a dinosaur weighing in at ~75 tonnes. Steven’s book infrequently returns to the new dinosaurs, those calling out all around us in the trees and in the bushes and flittering above the river. In fact, the birds are all I can think about and it’s remarkable how all my senses are now tuned towards them. Some species have gyroscopic necks which help them stabilize their vision whilst some species of hawk have a small film of skin that protects their eye so that they can dive towards their prey at 200mph. All I can see is hummingbirds and all I can hear are the chirps of crows. Isn’t this a relief? That last paragraph you read, I mean. The one up there, where nothing about The Conversation happened? Didn’t you feel your mind free and open to wander and learn new things again? Well, for me, The Conversation is boring as hell and all this talk about birds has renewed my optimism that the world is still full of remarkable subjects I know nothing about. Subjects that get blotted out by the One and Only Important Conversation, cast aside because everyone is too busy saying the same stuff about the same stuff. Deep down in my bones I know that these subjects—studying how the feathers on a bird wiggle, how this guy called Hermes puffs out the feathers on his neck when he’s happy—are the important things in this world most worth talking about, thinking about, letting bounce around in my mind. “Look at the birds!” Steven has been yelling at me all weekend through his book, ordering us, pleading with us, begging us to see old things in new ways. “Who cares about The Conversation when the world is still so full of dinosaurs?”