• Public

  • Public
  • Network
  • Groups
  • Featured
  • Popular
  • People

Photo of a large, plump, so-called gamebird shown in left-facing profile standing on top of a cross bar of chain-link fence. She is a female California quail, her face buff and short with a tiny, dark pull-tab emerging from her forehead. Her body is a soft grey in the warming light, smooth tail like a child's slide swooping a short run down from her back. Her wings have the soft, squarely ragged edges of a mushroom, and dozens of thready white flecks like quills mark her lower breast and bottom (which catch the sunlight and glow, so it's literally like the sun shines out of her behind). In the background are a few blurred, bare, sunlit sucker branches of our old plum tree, and beyond that a softer blur across the street of our neighbor's juniper bushes and wooden fence. She seems almost to be turning her head just slightly towards us, the slightly flirty glint of her pale eyebrow just shy of noting our presence. Such a dear.