It was Aristotle, in the first book of his “Nichomachean Ethics,” who wrote, “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy” to conclude his point that the cultivation of virtue takes prolonged effort and a great amount of time.
For those who count themselves regular readers of Mark Avery’s blog, the recent uptick in new book reviews can’t have gone unnoticed. When I recently called up the site, I thought “Blimey! Is Mark doing anything other than reading these days?” However I then noticed by-lines indicating that two of the four most recent reviews were penned by none other than the noted ornithologist Ian Carter acting a as a guest reviewer.
The sound is like nothing else on earth.
I was sound asleep, breathing in the fresh, clean air of the Berkshire countryside that drifted into my room through an open window near the bed, when I was jerked into consciousness by what I at first thought was a woman screaming. As I lay there in the dark, asking myself just what it was that I heard, another scream burst through the midnight silence, followed quickly by two more. By that time it was clear to me that it wasn’t a human scream, but for the life of me I couldn’t find anything in my brain to which it might be connected. More mammalian than avian, I finally drifted back off to sleep after some time, puzzling over the just what it might have been.
It was a fox – a Red Fox, Vulpes vulpes to be precise.
Difficult as it may be to believe, given all the time I have spent afield over the past decades, I have not yet seen a fox in the wild. Although Red Foxes, Vulpes vulpes, do inhabit the entirety of the northern hemisphere, including the Pacific Northwest where I live, I have never once seen so much as the swish of a tail or the twitch of a ear. Consequently, given the old adage “out of sight, out of mind,” I have never had much of a reason to devote any significant amount of time to learning about them.