Fragments From Floyd

They have startled the starch out of me, bursting up from invisible nowhere near my very feet to vanish through the overstory in a flurry of wings. I have thought myself to be having a thudding pounding heart attack when the hormone-primed made ultra-low-frequency strums with their wings in the mating drumbeats of spring courtship. But until yesterday, I had never seen one closer than fifty feet and never for longer than a split second.

As we pulled up the first quarter mile of Goose Creek's single lane road, there must have been something a bit odd about a rounded pile of leaves on the side of the road--or was it a clump of mud and gravel there on the driver's side of the car? I stopped just when the clump was directly under my window to have a look.

Honestly, at first, I thought I had indeed stopped to look at a clump of leaves. Only when my eye found his did I make out the shape of a perfectly formed, perfectly plump, perfectly cryptic Ruffed Grouse completely motionless not four feet from me. I motioned for Ann from the passenger's side to slowly lean over and look.

My word, look at the variety of feather patterns, all of them the color of dead oak leaves with dapples of sunlight, of last year's cinnamon fern, red-brown and lacey. I had to find the eye to confirm that this patterned clump was truly alive.

"I wonder if he's sick" Ann said about the time I tapped sharply on the window glass. And the bird wandered unruffled down the steep bank of the road above the creek and disappeared into the laurel shade and was gone.