Crushed Eagle Beak

2025-12-02

Dear False Potato Mother,

New business: Preorders are now open for EPUB and print versions of Black Hole Science is Filled with Apologies! Also I have a gallows humor flash fic piece about being trans and living in semi-rural America up today at Bull called Crushed Eagle Beak.



Bird business: Earlier this month I went out birding and got three life birds (common merganser, cooper's hawk, downy woodpecker) at two different parks in the Allyn/Belfair, WA area. None of them are particularly rare, but I'm still pretty new to this birding thing. The Downy Woodpecker is nearly identical to the Hairy Woodpecker but just cuter and smaller (the beak is a dead giveaway). The Cooper's Hawk is very close to the Sharp-Shinned Hawk (named so because its legs are featherless compared to other hawks, which have little feather pants), but this particular Cooper's Hawk sat perfectly still in range of my binoculars and politely waited for me to look up photos and descriptions to identify him (look at phone, look into binos, look at phone, into binos, etc).

When I was a kid my dad would drag me out super early in the morning to go fishing. He'd go rain or shine and sometimes (because I didn't have a choice) so would I. I honestly hated it. It was a lot of sitting around doing nothing and I wanted to be home playing video games. My dad really saw it as this bonding thing. And in a pretty gendered way--he did take my sisters, but was fine when they didn't want to go. I think I, being the youngest and "male" was the one he really hoped would be into it. All the men in my family fished--grandpa, uncle, dad, brother in law. It was that and Indiana University basketball. I didn't care about either. I cared about Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII.

These days I find myself caring a lot less about Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII and a lot more about getting up before sunrise and going to stand in the rain in the middle of the woods, or by the side of a pond or a marsh. I would probably enjoy fishing a lot more now, but as I got older I never liked the whole "man vs nature, kill to eat when you can buy it at the grocery store" philosophy. And "catch & release" really means "gouge a huge hole through the side of its face with a hook and then make it live like that." I was a vegetarian for ten years. I just don't think I could ever be a passionate fisherman (or fisherwoman for that matter), even if I had to do it for food, it would be just for that, not for the joy of it. But there is some thread, some reinvention of the same thing my dad loved about it that I feel like I've been able to pursue through birdwatching. There's a whole natural world out there that still exists IRL despite the feeling like everything exists in computers now. Living 40 minutes from anyone else I know means I have to do something to keep myself from becoming an entirely computer-based being (I even read books on an ereader now) and this is it. I thought I would be too ADHD for it, but I'm not. I love it. It brings out a patience in me because I just love it. I love playing where's waldo with a woodpecker among a million douglas fir trees and I love getting to stare at some mottled brown duck and try to challenge myself to figure out what the hell it is. I love it enough to get up before sunrise to stand in the rain and do it. Which is something beautiful about myself that I hadn't discovered before this year, and it makes me wonder what else there is inside me that I haven't found yet after forty-something years.

Thanks to Caitlin for the photo <3

At one point that weekend, I was in this area where there are a lot of bald eagles (I think I saw like nine of them yesterday, seven in this area) and I was walking under this tree when I looked up and saw one maybe 20 feet in front of me and 30 feet up, peering down at me. I stopped, he opened his wings and dropped down toward me and I could see its full wingspan and talons. It was like some part of me that was a tiny prey mammal in a past life brought up a wave of fear that rushed over me as this impressive animal came at me before swooping up over my head. All I could think was "The headline 'transgender woman killed by bald eagle' would feel a bit on the nose as far as metaphors for the current moment go."


Listening:


Watching:


Playing

  • Penitent Who would have thought that Name of the Rose of all things would make a great video game?

  • Reading:

    • Fitz and the Fool Trilogy by Robin Hobb - I finally finished Realm of the Elderlings, all sixteen doorstopper-length books and it's been a really special experience. If you've never spent this much time reading books about a set of characters, I encourage the experience. It's amazing.
    • Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufmann - A sort of On the Road for birders, a memoir about the author as a kid in the early 1970s, hitchhiking around birding, trying to do a "Big Year" which is a competitive birding thing where people try to see as many species as possible in one year. I think competitive birding is a little silly, but at the end of the day, I'm here for the birds and so are they, so I can enjoy the drama.


    love u to bits,

    Never Angeline Nørth