ChasingDonguri

Looking Back at 2009 from Chasing Donguri.

I was reading some Parker Palmer today, and something he said reminded me of Annie Dillard's weasel essay, found in Teaching a Stone to Talk. I read the essay again, and seeing as it is the inspiration for our blog's byline, I thought I would go ahead and post it here. It is one of my all-time favorite essays.

Click on the "continue reading" link to see the whole thing.

ANNIE DILLARD

LIVING LIKE WEASELS

A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton--once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?

I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.

Keep watching, and you'll get some crazy hops starting at 1:20.

Yesterday I was witness to the giant migration of the Baikal Teal.  At least we think it was the baikal teal, as there was no English around to inform us and I had to look it up when we got home.  Huge groups of these birds meet at this one place in the river delta near Gunsan and then fly off.  From what I read on wikipedia it sounds like Korea could be the end of their trek, as they start from the Baikal region in Russia. 

I was invited out by our friends Jim and Carol.  Jordan was busy working on a game (to be released later today I think), and didn't join us.  We had an adventure on the bus, first missing our stop and worrying the bus driver, then walking in the frigid Gunsan air (sometime overnight it turned freezing, there's a chance of snow today).  There is a bird zoo and museums at the site of the bird's landing, and an observation tower.  Since this was the big weekend, there was also an exciting festival going around.  I think Carol and I will feature in next year's informational brochure because there was a photographer following us around for a while. 

We almost missed the birds whose party it was because unless you looked really closely they just looked like a sandbar out on the river, despite the sandbar being pointed out as a thing of interest by the men in charge of the binoculars. 

For more pictures click here.