Basking Invader

The extreme cold snaps we had this past winter killed off a lot of invasive fauna, but not all.

Spotted this guy sunning himself along the New River a few days ago-


He's impressive to look at, but he's also a destructive pest.  He and all his progeny - and there will be progeny - will burrow along the sea wall, eventually causing it to collapse.  They also stink worse than Muscovy ducks, and are associated with spreading salmonella.

Duckling Watch

It's spring, which means ducklings.  Yes, even if they are Muscovy ducklings.  They're cute until they start to fledge.

Mama Cooley and her brood was caught on camera last week:

Here they are again on Memorial Day -


While all looks well, if you count up the ducklings, she's down one.  This inexorable decline in number will continue.  And morbid as it may be, we'll be keeping watch around the bend.

Time will tell if she's as successful as Mama Argyle, who got half her brood to fledge.


Of course, they aren't so cuddly at this adolescent age.


So why are they called Muscovy ducks?  "Muscovy" means "of Moscow," and yet these birds are not from Russian, they are native to South and Central America.  It's actually a bastardization of its latin name, cairina moschata, which means "the musky one from Cairo."  Yes, even in 1793, when the thing was first classified, they got its homeland wrong.

But they got the musk part right; you can always tell when a Muscovy duck has been hanging around.

BTW, despite their patch color, these are all pure-breed ducks.  The species has always had that patchwork look to them.

Bird Watch: Spot Breasted Oriole

This colorful fella was chowing down on fresh bugs he plucked out of the spider web, as well as  the spider.  Guy's gotta eat.

A Beginning

I've been blogging for several years. In fact, I have an insane number of blogs, and ultimately, it seems the only way to bring things under control is to start again.

There's a photo blog, the vent-my-spleen blog, a gluten-free lifestyle blog (that never took off), a blog a friend started that now consists entirely of three posts by me, a family genealogy blog, and an arts blog.

ACK! Too much!

So we'll be combining a few of them; I won't actually be closing the other blogs - there's some good stuff in them. But I'll be focusing on my arts blog, and this one.

The name of the blog is inspired by where I'm now living, Fort Lauderdale's Sailboat Bend neighborhood. But this isn't a neighborhood blog (despite the address which would seem to say otherwise). I'm not doing neighborhood news or gossip. I'm not that connected. Or interested.

It is an interesting place, with lots of interesting stuff, and I will share photos and impressions from time to time. There will be essays. There will be poems. I warn you, they will probably be just awful poems, tawdry things that rhyme. And there will be stories; all of the stories will be true, although I will be making most of them up.

You see, being "round the bend" is more a state of mind than a matter of geography. Some say it means you've gone crazy; others more diplomatically say "mentally irregular." My own take is that one has gotten away from the crowd and stepped out of view for a moment, going around a bend in the river of life.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.