Jeremiah Tolbert

Last Saturday, I was tak­ing pho­tos of the herd of bull elk I like to fol­low around when sud­denly I heard some­thing heavy land on the roof of my car. I was at the base of a cliff. “Landslide?” I mut­tered. I waited for another sound, for the crush­ing rocks.

None came.

There was a brief flut­ter­ing, and a large black and white mag­pie landed on the post right out­side my pas­sen­ger side win­dow. He preened and tilted, try­ing to see if there was any food in my car. While he did so, I refo­cused and started snap­ping shots. Nervous as hell that he would fly away, or I would have framed this one a bit bet­ter and not cut off the feath­ers on the right side of the frame.

While I was shoot­ing, it began to call out in a dozen dif­fer­ent sounds, other bird calls, and what I swear was a cell­phone ring tone. I got around a dozen shots, and then it was gone.

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