From an Island, #2

Jon asked for more pictures from Captiva, so I'm thinking, which ones? The strangler vines that remind me of Daphne turning into a tree?I wish I could show you the turtle that Lucinda saw in the jungle, the one with the delicate sepia pattern on its cream-colored carapace, but s/he hasn't revealed her/himself to me yet. Whenever one of us sees some new wildlife, there some anxiety about having not been observant enough to see it when it's a combination of attention and LUCK that brings it about. Bill was able to show me where the screech owl sings and Lucinda had heard him in that spot already several times.Yesterday I watched an osprey devour a mullet for lunch. there was only half a mullet there by the time I happened on the scene... usually it's still wriggling as it's devoured, now that's, as Beckett would say, "lepping fresh."“After lifting its catch from the water, an osprey turns the fish’s head forward, thus reducing wind resistance while flying back to the perch.”In his new memoir, Nick Flynn notes: “Mimesis, it would seem, can only come from close attention to the world, and this attention (as Weil points out) is a type of prayer, another (possible) way to escape the cage of ego.”Drawing the little blue heron on the dock of the Fish House was today’s prayer, my blue pencil following the rotation of his body as he warily watched me watching him.