One of these things is not like the other

We have a new visitor in Milford harbor -- a Pied-billed Grebe. After four years of walking by the harbor every day, you just don't expect to see something different, but there it was all of a sudden a couple of weeks ago. Boink. It popped up from under the water, looking like a rubber ducky compared to the Mallards. And it's stayed around. Now that the weather's getting cold, it's sidling up to the Mallards, coasting along with them. You would think that it might try to do its best to just get along with everyone -- but no, not only is it trying to be a duck, it's trying to be the alpha duck. I saw the cheeky bugger lean forward and bite a female Mallard on the tail, seemingly just for the hell of it, and then dive immediately under the water, leaving just a ripple -- and a confused Mallard turning to look behind her -- in its wake. It was such a soft, fuzzy, fog-advisory Milford day, everything just looked like a Turner painting.

Spot the dinky little interloper

Cue "Jaws" music -- going in for the tail bite

Who? A grebe? You crazy.

Mallards really are beautiful.

Things I am grateful for today

• Autumn air, which smells of sunshine and dry leaves and dreams deliciously dissolving into memory.
• Seed pods scattered all over the sidewalk, which crunch under your every footstep and crackle in a way that makes you feel like a child again.
• A fish crow making the weirdest mewling sound, so that I looked under a hedge for the kitten that must be there, then around the corner for the mother that must surely be pushing a baby on their afternoon walk, and then finally at the roof line above, and the crow looking down at me, making this soft, plaintive sound.
• Three young yellow-crowned night-herons that swooped into a part of the harbor I have never seen them in before, silent and gray like stealth warplanes.
• Funky Duck, the mind-bending hybrid of mallard and who knows what else, still bobbing around with the mallards as you did all summer, somehow fitting in with them though you are double the size and have those crazy white spectacles.
• An osprey standing in the shallows bathing and drinking as though it were on holiday from the swooping diving flapping fish-snatching hawk life, staying there so long that I began to rehearse in my head the phone call to a wildlife rescue service about this injured, defenseless osprey stuck in Milford harbor.
• The man at the dock who didn't make me feel like a fool when, thinking I was all alone, I laughed out loud as the osprey shook like a dog and took off, then shimmied mid-air, realizing the job of shaking off those droplets wasn't as complete as it had thought -- clumsy and awesome all at once.