Seasonal Elegies

Spring is here, which is, among other things, migrating season. There is a mass butterfly migration going on in Davis; they are on the way to Seattle according to an Entomologist I work with; apparently they're born with six days' worth of fat on them and they just fly continuously till they run out of fat (this is not, I hope, how Scott and Rachel are planning to move to Seattle). Wherever they are when they run out they just stop and mate, maybe pollinate some stuff, I dunno. They are very pretty, though a little scary when they're coming at your windshield.

There's also a mass duck migration on. You can see them everywhere, mostly in opposite-sex pairs, waddling around and gobbling up chazzerai. Apparently they mate for the season, but occasionally you see a set of two boys and a girl, and you can just hear the female saying "Allow me to introduce Dale's cousin Milton. He has his own hardware store, you know, and very good genes. His father lived to be 6. Quack." And today I saw a pair of males swimming in the arboretum on my way home from work; I think one of them might have been biting the other but I'm not sure what that might reflect about their relationship. On Sunday we had a surprise rainstorm, and as I was waiting for Mike to pull the car out, feeling cold and wet and cranky about the giant puddle in between me and the car door, I looked over at the next driveway and saw a pair of ducks playing in another giant puddle, diving and quacking and looking extremely happy, and I instantly cheered up.