Wrens … those wrens are becoming my psychosis. At least fifteen take up here or there with my walking flush, as I go out to the tractor of the wheel line irrigator. I just get the glasses on them when they drop like a stone and are gone. No attention is paid to my best Dudley Do-Right impersonation, “Come out of there … youuu!”, which I give while standing at the place where one disappears. A chitter back from the deep grass twenty feet from there is all I get. The wheel line, which runs the length of the entire field, is fired up and the joystick thrust forward to run it all north across most of the pasture to where the new watering cycle is to begin, and as it rolls it scares up one after another wren who bounces off before it. That pasture is just full of the birds! They flee in an edged line before the advancing aluminum monster, it seems by the time I’m near to finishing the move the birds are as thick as grasshoppers pushed off before a prairie fire–and still I can make out nothing in the way of markings that would without doubt tell which is its species.

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