Back in Tucson; architecture, URBAN parrots, and running in the canyon...from parrots to parrot

We've been home for a few days now...

Still jet-lagged, of course...

It's been a month since I last posted--yep, there was no blogging on this trip...It was good to be away and off-line for a few weeks...well, mostly; most of the places we stayed did have wi-fi, but I limited using it to evening hours, and I left the laptop at home. I wanted to be there...

And now there is just so much to reflect on--I almost wish I had blogged during the trip--a 'live' travelogue, like I did when I went to Korea two summers ago. And on Monday I'm back to work--the new school-year begins already here in Tucson...

I decided to go for a run in Sabino Canyon this morning. What a change from just a week ago, when we were spending Saturday morning around Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. S. and I had packed up and were all ready to take the afternoon train to Madrid, so we had the morning free to explore.

It IS impressive--this giant construction-site has become almost synonymous with the Catalan metropolis...but is it beautiful, or simply impressive? Is it uplifting, or is it just domineering? It's touristically blasphemous to say, but I'm going to say it: I don't particularly like La Sagrada Familia. 

It fascinates me, it impresses me, it intrigues me...and I love so much of Gaudí's other designs--but this structure in particular doesn't move me. I first visited it fourteen (yikes!) years ago...and then last weekend was my wife's introduction to it. 

She and I strolled around the whole structure--the surrounding city blocks are parks, so you can take in the scale from a reasonable distance, instead of having to crane your neck from the base--discussing our reaction to various buildings and our opinions of this one. Both the building and our thoughts: works in progress.

I get it--the engineering, and the desire to incorporate motifs from nature, both vegetal:

(worker taking a break by the giant spire-topping berries)

...and animal:

And so for me, the building has its moments...but as a whole, it just doesn't seem to come together...and yes, I know, I know, it's unfair to judge 'the whole' since it isn't even finished yet. OK, OK...

I do wonder, if Gaudí were still alive today, what he would think of it...

So, taking in Gaudí's architecture--definitely a highlight of a Saturday morning...

...but the real highlight for us last Saturday was unexpected and came just as we'd finished our circuit of the stones-and-cranes: in the plaza northeast of the cathedral, I noticed a woman, with a movie camera, on a platform near some palms:

...aiming up, not at the spires of Sagrada Familia, but at some palms:

My wife and I had been hearing peculiar birdsong, and a couple of days previously, had spotted some parrots in the palms of the Park Güell elsewhere in town--yep, parrots (NOT native to Europe)--and as we tuned our ears now, and then as I zoomed in with my camera to the same palms the filmmaker, Sue Gibson, was focused on--this is what we saw:

 a parrot--nesting!

Monk parakeets, also known as Quaker parrots, are native to Argentina, but now live in feral populations in various locations throughout North America and Europe, escaped or released pets forming colonies, reproducing and adapting to urban environments...

We immediately thought of the award-winning documentary from a few years ago, "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill," which was filmed in San Francisco.

Assisting Ms. Gibson, at the base of the platform, was Matt Hamilton--a researcher working with a British TV production company behind the current project "Planet Parrot." Here's a description from their website:

     More than 70,000 parrots live wild in cities across the globe. Planet Parrot explores the inexorable rise of the urban parrot – from monk parakeets adapting to city life in America and Europe to sulphur-crested cockatoos in Melbourne and Singapore. Planet Parrot discovers the many ways parrots have adapted to a metropolitan lifestyle.

(I just love the phrase "inexorable rise of the urban parrot.")

Matt told us about how they'd been in Stuttgart, Germany, earlier in the year, filming Amazon parrots that have adapted to the cold winters--they got footage of the tropical birds eating snow in sub-freezing temperatures! "Inexorable rise" indeed...

Parrots adapting...settling in foreign cities, making do, and thriving...I feel a metaphor coming on...

Back to this morning's run in Arizona...

...I ran a section of lower Sabino Canyon that I don't typically run on a weekend morning, and came upon this scene: 

So tiny...

So, from one Saturday to another, from Spain to Arizona--from parrot to hummingbird...

(and the team is here every other Saturday from spring the fall, banding, marking, studying...)

Happening upon the unexpected--always a highlight. 

After a month away, it's good to go for a run in a desert canyon again...and after nearly a month, now, of the monsoon--so green...

And, we're back home to our little parrot:

Summer vacation is over, Paquito; we're home for a while now...