"Outside the cats, living in Athens must be easy for a Monk Parakeet. Inside a cat, it isn’t, of course, and there are more than a few felines around. There are the sweet street calicos who purr for a handout and there are the shy old tabbies who’ve lost an eye and an ear. There are more types too, but the distinction is insignificant to a parakeet. They all have teeth and claws to use.
I like the cats and the homeless dogs. Homeless isn’t stray and even stray isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In America, there’s the assumption that a dog on the street won’t last long. “She’ll die of hunger and the cold, if a car doesn’t get her! Poor thing’d be better off in a shelter.” Here, most dogs without collars are fat and content. They're vaccinated too.
There were three gray-muzzled mutts outside the Delphi Museum when I visited this weekend. They lay on the courtyard flagstones in warm Mediterranean sunlight. It’s really quite a nice place to live, if a bit rundown by the aeons. I wondered when I saw them how they’d ended up there and how long ago. Business at Delphi must have been profitable about a couple thousand years ago—a weary pilgrim could surely have spared a scrap of sacrificial goat for a hound in hunger. Today any half-kind tourist would do no less with a PB&J.
Delphi is the center of the world, according to the Ancient Greeks. Zeus was the god that found it. The story goes something like this: one day, the mighty thunderer took a rest from all the adultery and fornication. That afternoon, bored out of his mind, he decided to locate the very navel of his kingdom. He called for his two eagles to fly in opposite directions, compassing the planet. One bird flew east, farther even than Asia Minor, and the other went west over Italy. They collided at Delphi, clearly indicating that the holy site was nothingless than the center of the world. As a birder, I can say with confidence that the frequency of bird collisions is effectively zero, so take that last bit with some salt.
Talking of birding, there’s a lot to see here in Greece. I’ve identified twenty-seven species of birds that I’d never identified before. Lifers, as they’re termed. Number twenty-six and number twenty-seven were nesting in the ruins of Delphi, the Blue Rock Thrush and the Rock Nuthatch. The Rock Doves were wild on the cliffs above the temple complex. They are to the feral pigeons of Athens as the wolf is to the dog. The city pigeons lost much of their dignity when people realized that they could breed for shapes and plumages to suit each fancy. Now they pick at crusts of bread on the curb and steal loudly into the National Garden’s aviary to eat the depressed Peacocks’ food. The Monk Parakeets eat that too. I guess there’s enough to go around."
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