Flash Fiction

Binoculars help. Let’s face it, when I look through my binoculars, tits are everywhere. Great Tits are found in Australia and Europe, but not in North America; if you want to see Great Tits you must go, or be there to see them.

To identify the delicate details of a tit for your bird list, you need three things:

1. A keen interest in tits

2. A wide field-of-view to see more than one at the same time

3. A quality lens optic with high, capture-light, colour-contrast factors

Why binoculars you ask?

Great Tits are easy to spot with the naked eye but for the smaller, almost invisible tits, you need to be closer to make an accurate identification. This is where a blind comes into the picture. It’s best to watch them in their natural habitat by hiding in a blind. (You can see them but they can’t see you, but if you get caught you might get blinded.)

Birdwatcher’s binoculars (bins) are lightweight, weatherproof, fog resistant and offer viewing range numeration: 10x42 is the favoured for water birding at the beach or off the shore. The 10x42 model is best for boobies but not worth a dam for tits.

Expensive ‘bins’ can bring them to the tip of your nose making it a thrill to enjoy them at such close quarters.

Tits hide and flicker into the light and can be very bold in their pursuit of something to eat. No flycatchers here, swooping and diving with a fine-tipped bill, tits use their stout, sturdy bill to do the job of providing for life.

Tits have no enemies and for good reason, who would want to harm a cute little tit?

Tits love nuts. (You saw this coming, right?) They grow into prime maturity by sampling different nuts. Sunflower seeds are a choice treat and a tit can tell when a nut they pick up is an empty dud. High-oil content nuts are preferred over dry, boring seeds. But I digress.

Wind has no effect on tits; they’re windproof, waterproof, and they’re very friendly, tits are. They’ll respond to fingertips if you tempt them with a choice morsel.

To find tits, look for a place where they feed and don’t mind the mosquitos and midges as tits love open wooded areas and are not at their best presentation in confined, tight-fitting environments.

North American tits are called chickadees or titmice and are a pure joy to observe in their native habitats. But there’s not much to admire as they are rather small, nondescript birds when compared to the Great Tits found in Australasia and Europe.

There are near 10,000 different birds on our planet, including the flightless penguin, emu and ostrich. But my vote’s in for the Parus genus, especially the lovers of the Parus major, as we’re a dedicated, birdwatching group, worthy of this mention and appreciated only by the aficionado few.

THE DETAILS OF DUST ARE LOST on elderly people. Why? You can’t hear dust; it doesn’t make a noise and you can’t see it with smudged bifocals or age-dimmed vision. The old don’t notice dust because dust is something, to them, that doesn’t make a difference anymore.

Old is closer to ‘dust’ than young; there’s a kinship being established. Aging you accept dust; long before it’s recognized as your old relations. You become cognizant of your contribution to the pile; your measure soon blowing in the wind. You gain a familiarity with dust before your dust-to-dust time comes.

Dust on the shelf or tabletop will soon include us too. Each breath we take has molecules exhaled of Shakespeare, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad and the Neanderthal. Every inhalation contains molecules the once existing (plants, and animals included here) now gone. Everything turns to dust; it must.

We have atoms in our bodies from every living being that lived. We are composites of previous life. Visible we’re here now; invisible we’re not, but we’re never completely gone. There will always be dust; it is infinite, cheap and available to all. We are made of star dust that’s kind cool.

The dead become dust, easily dusted away, soon forgotten. Maybe, we’ll be sneezed out a few times to teach everyone not to forget us too soon. We’ll always be here: in dust we trust.

Sometimes, from a dust abhorring cleaner’s enthusiasm, we are dusted from furnishings around the house onto rag shaken into the air to entered the atmospheres dust is a forever thing. Worth mention, women are weighed down with the burden of dust more than men. They feel peace at the lack of it. Men get dusty and musty, women never so.

Dusting is a never-ending job and best done by a maid allergic to dust who sneezes her way through the day so you know she’s busy, and when she stops sneezing the job is done.

That’s the way it is: the young want the clean, dust-free life and the old gather dust, to invest in their future. Gathering dust means we’re still alive; collecting it is something we learn to do on death.

Dust is considered dirty and dirt needs cleaning; this means a clean sweep’s best for all. A fresh start, the polished sheen; hope for a bright and shiny future is a quest of the young.

It’s always been this way, except when it wasn’t. Back-in-the-day we died as the dust flew but before it settled. If the DNA ancestor websites depended on dust, they wouldn’t have anything to work with that wasn’t already somebody else.

Little do the young know and well it’s so… one day they’ll be dust too. They won’t see the grand importance of dust until then and when it comes time to gather on a shelf, they’ll be wiped clean with the rest of us as dust.

By dust we’re separated and though dust we’re joined again.

Tits: How to tell them apart

A Detail of Dust