Zosterops lateralis

A silvereye poking about a young pohutukawa at the lookout point over Oamaru. Not my best shot of it, but I like this one. Makes the bird appear curious yet unobliging, which, in my experience so far, is typical. For the full body shot, I've got one on Flickr.

You can at least see its distinguishing feature--its eye of silver. The genus Zosterops includes dozens of species with this sort of bold white eye ring, though the whole lot of them are called "white-eyes." Only this one gets the silver distinction, though I couldn't say why. This species is naturally distributed throughout the South Pacific and much of Australia, and is self-introduced in New Zealand, having first bred here in the 1830's.

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Today I bought a wonderful book about Blue Penguins in Slightly Foxed, one of several secondhand book stores in the Victorian district. Slightly Foxed is my favorite of the used book shops here; it's got the most delicious collection of bird books in town. I couldn't get this penguin book out of my mind since I found it a few days ago, so I popped in this morning and bought it.

When I brought it up to the front, the woman wrote the sale down in a large ledger on the desk. You never see this sort of ledger anywhere but in the antique book store, the kind where you walk in to find stacks and stacks of dusty books, piled high to the ceiling and packed into tight labyrinthine corridors. The kind of shop that doesn't appear to have a back to it, within whose depths you expect to find some old hardbound book of magic spells that's the real deal.

The penguin book seemed magic enough to me. I was about to grab it when the woman went for a roll of brown paper mounted on the desk, I supposed with which to wrap it. Now me, I nearly always gently put a stop to this sort of thing, for the sake of conserving materials and reducing waste. Oh, the number of times I've volunteered the words, "That's all right, I don't need a bag." But something made me bite my tongue this time. I'd like to say it was anything other than intimidation; the woman was cold and the book store old; I felt out of my element and I didn't want to disrupt the energy or call attention to myself. So I let her carry on.

What she gave me as a result had me beaming like an enlightened being as I walked out into the street. She tore the paper to perfect dimensions, folded it over the book like a Christmas present, wrapped it in twine, which she tied in a bow, and then embossed the folded edge of the paper with a stamp of the store's name. It was just beautiful.

I thought about what would've happened if I had in fact said something. I would've walked out with the book, but not with her gift, not with the humbling feeling of warmth the gesture provoked in me. Not with the lesson that resistance sometimes deprives us of special experiences.

I want to crack open the book and drink up its penguin knowledge, but it's sitting here beside me now, still wrapped. I like it too much as it is--for its beauty and for what it's given me--to open it yet.

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One other thing! Like a mad woman I compiled a BlipBigLife list and posted it on my About page. With today's entry I've blipped 113 different species since my journal's first entry in 2008. That's about a quarter of my 460 some entries. I've been wanting to make the list for a long time; the BlipBigYear inspired me to see what I've shared so far. Now it's up to me to make the list longer....