It all points to a time when people had a different connection with place, a complex knowledge of and taxonomy for describing flora and fauna.

For a great dictionary of these kinds of terms, not for birds but for general terrain, check Home Ground edited by Barry Lopez.

The following is taken from Wikipedia:

The standard collective noun for a group of birds of any type is a flock.[1]

For a number of individual birds, there exist collective nouns particular to the type of bird. Many of these collective nouns are fanciful and not in common use in English. The book A Mess of Iguanas… A Whoop of Gorillas by Alon Shulman is a good reference for the collective nouns and their etymology. James Lipton’s book An Exaltation of Larks is devoted to these collective nouns, many of which originated as hunters’ terms and have been in the language for centuries.

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If you’re just sitting there in the front seat that’s suspicious.

The trick is to use your cellphone. An innocent prop that’s easily visible to passersby on the streets outside of the vehicle. A cellphone with a 3.7 inch AMOLED display and 24-bit color, angled to reflect conspicuously through the driver’s window, is a tool to transform you from threat to non-threat.

With a cellphone in your hand, you’re just some guy checking a map, email, or text message. Whatever. Just checking something before you go home for the night.

it’s all just about whatever’s happening right here.

this guy, adrian, was like ‘lindo dia no?‘

and he showed me where there’s a little pozito of agua that’s pure and comes straight up out of the aquifer. you can see the little streaks of sulfur in the water.

and he invited me to go up there with him to explore the monte, al caballo. [to the mountain, by horse]

he said come on over early some sunday morning, come early and we’ll go up there together.

and it’s all just like that, everything’s just like right about the day and what can happen downstream.

and while we were sitting there, a little bit of the waterfall blew, like the wind changed direction and the water sprinkled down over us and he said that the waterfall did that when it was getting jealous.

And then, as if it were all planned, you see her walking through town. She gives you the face-smile, but here in the sunlight it seems embarrassing to move right up to her with all these bags in your hand and a 5 gallon water jug over your shoulder. You’re not sure if you’re supposed to kiss again, so you just set everything down and stand nearby, studying her face, checking – nervously now – for signs that she really doesn’t want to talk to you, that she’d really rather just continue on doing whatever else she was doing.

“Hola,” you say.

“Hola.”

recorded some bossa nova chords a few days ago on my iPod.

on the way home from returning some videos last night i started remixing them, adding some 808 kicks.

i think i could spend all day adding different 808 kicks to whatever i’m experiencing.

the only thing is that the kicks here don’t sound like they did when i was making them. they’re more like blips now.

i can never get the bass to come out deep enough in the mixdown.

like garlic, red wine, and waves, you can never have enough bass.

i used to make fun of those low rider dudes in high school that sat out in the parking lot showing off the subwoofers in their mustangs or IROC cameros or whatever.

whatever you make fun of ends up being your master.

played around with some guitar recordings on my iPod while on the chairlift in cerro catedral.

image: phil more