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Our Book Club selection for Feb. 13 is e Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. Here is a brief description from Amazon.com: "Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, e Covenant of Water is set in Kerala on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning — and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a 12-year-old girl from Kerala's long- existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her 40-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl — and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi — will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants. A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, e Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years." Our meetings are held on the second Tuesday of each month at 9:30 am in the RCN building, room #3. All of our book selections are recommended by book club members. Someone volunteers to lead the discussion about the book we have chosen for the month. For more information about the Four Seasons Book Club or to get on our mailing list, please contact me at michelesrosen@gmail.com. ~ Micki Rosen FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | FEBRUARY 2024 41 Birding CLUB Birds are one of the few animals that we encounter every day. We may not have a pet dog or cat, and we seldom run into wild animals, but most days we see and hear birds. We take for granted what we know about birds: they are warm-blooded vertebrates and the only animals with feathers. They all have wings and most of them can fly. They have beaks and lay eggs. But here is a fact that's not so obvious: birds are actually living dinosaurs! Birds don't look much like those huge thundering reptiles that terrified us in Jurassic Park, so how did scientists figure this out? Paleontologists at prestigious places like the American Museum of Natural History have begun to collect more fossils and information that lead them to believe that birds evolved from theropods (a carnivorous dinosaur of a group whose members are typically bipedal and range from small and delicately built to very large). This is the same group of carnivorous animals that included Tyrannosaurus Rex. Early birds were small feathered dinosaurs who gradually lost their teeth and developed beaks. When a giant asteroid slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, it caused massive changes to the environment, and most of the large dinosaurs became extinct. However, birds managed to survive. They were small, agile, and could fly so they could find food and shelter in trees. They could also eat a lot of different kinds of foods like seeds, fruit, insects, and even carrion. All of this allowed them to adapt and flourish in a changing world. The cute and humble Song Sparrow pictured below is just one of the birds seen at the Four Seasons. On our recent bird club walk, Genie Cooper kept track of a surprising variety of birds. We saw some noisy crows and ravens, hummingbirds, Lesser Goldfinches, a Mountain Chickadee, a Mourning Dove, a Nuttall's Woodpecker, some Spotted Towhees, and a White-Crowned Sparrow. Imagine, all those birds, plus the birds sitting on your backyard fence and singing you awake in the mornings are actually cousins of velociraptors! ~ Kathy Hull Book Club Song Sparrow at Four Seasons; photo by Gerrie Karczynski

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