Global warming has hit Shepherdstown. A raptor, a predatory bird has evidently moved into (or onto) Reynolds Hall despite all the daytime noise from the extensive renovations being done to that building usually overbooked town venue.

I’ve yet to see this bird but its distinctive call has a regularity suggestive of tenacity bordering on the obsessive. It would appear to be more consistent, time-wise, than the several faces of the town’s clocks—and that right through the winter. It must be global warming.

What’s more, this raptor squawks on through the night, way past dark. What could be more eerie than an unseen eyrie? Do raptors go after bats? Would that be vespertilian vespers?

Jeepers Peepers

The spring peepers must be wondering what the heck is going on. One day they’re raising a ruckus with their mating calls—audible on Duke Street from the Town Run below King Street—and the next they’re probably wondering why the heck they came out of hibernation, or wherever they disappear to in cold weather.

The question is: Once they come out of it, is that irreversible? Can they go back in to escape cold weather? I mean, Jeepers Peepers, have we lost them for good?

On a hospital visit I got on the elevator and a total stranger said “We could wear bathing suits at Christmas and on Easter we’re all bundled up.”

What could I say? “Going up?”

It Dawned on Us

It was COLD for an Easter sunrise service observed by 22 or so folk at the Rumsey Monument. By now stalwarts know to bring something thick with good insulation value to sit on when the forecast is for a cold Easter Sunday. And to dress warmly.

Canada geese honked away, and the sun rose with a double image. We could see our shadows, but everybody was shivering and long-disgusted with Punxatawny Phil, so no one speculated about how long global warming would possibly stay this cold in Shepherdstown.

Cormorants Galore

A far-flung correspondent from upper Michigan writes: “We finally have some movement on the crested cormorant problem. They have had a population explosion that is phenomenal. The folks up at Paradise say hundreds are long the beaches and shallows eating the fingerlings and small fish. . . . The pressure from the tourism industry has made the DNR face the realities that populations are excessive. Their studies confirmed what the fisherman, etc., have been saying for some years.”

Isn’t that what studies are for?

Cormorants migrate up the Potomac River each year. In season you can see them flocked in a relatively small tree just below the old Shepherdstown Rumsey Bridge. Cormorants have a distinctive shape vis á vis the usual local birds. They look like streamlined shore birds with ultra short legs. Maybe they’re the wiener dogs of the avian cosmos.

North to Alaska? Not!

If a nursing home is the object of your move. The highest average cost for private care in nursing homes is recorded in Alaska—$388.00 per day. Most hotels, even beach front, are cheaper, but all they do is make up your bed daily—if you’re not in it—and clean the bathroom.

Generation Gap a Brainy Thing

According to The Week magazine, the book This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin asserts that the “mature brain eventually loses its capacity to latch onto new sounds.” So the generation gap is not about iPods and MP3 players or serious Sirius radio but about neurological realities.

Womb Smarts, for Eight Weeks

All brains are evidently female until the eighth week, says the book The Female Brain. Then all goes to hell in male brains because testosterone—which is NOT pronounced like an Italian dessert—floods the male brain then. Author Louanne Brizendine, a neuroscientist whose last name sounds like an antihistamine—says the testosterone flood kills cells in the brainy communications area and grows cells in the sex-and-aggression area.

Was that the Four Tops singing “Can’t Help Myself”?

It’s good to know that male-female twins can at least get along for the first two months in the womb.

Back to that Reynolds Raptor

From poet X. J. Kennedy’s forthcoming Peeping Tom’s Cabin: Comic Verse 1928–2008 from BOA Editions, Ltd., this quatrain from its “Ghastly Brats” section:

“While we dazed onlookers gawk

Baby’s borne off by a hawk.

Few, I bet, if any chickens

Ever give it tougher pickins.