Summer Visitor

It's been a hot, quiet, couple of weeks here in Beirut. Most of my ex-pat colleagues have headed back to the States or Europe for the summer, and many well-heeled Beirutis are spending their traditional looong weekends in their villas up in the cool, breezy mountains of Lebanon. I've been enjoying the quiet--getting some good work done on a new paper, trying to get to the gym more regularly, and going for evening strolls around the green and leafy campus.

While most of the AUB community seems to have flown the coop for the summer, we did get an unexpected visitor to our balcony the other day: a parakeet! Mind you, our place may look idyllic, set amidst palm trees and sweet-smelling jasmine bushes, but parakeet country it isn't. It was quite a surprise, then, Jeff spotted it on the railing the other day. It spent about fifteen minutes or so hopping around out there, and then flew away. Jeff emailed a photo of it to the Middle East Ornithological Association (which, oddly, is based in England and appears to be composed entirely of Brits). On their website we discovered that apparently there was at one time a breeding population of ring-necked parakeets on the AUB campus. However, our visitor was not of that flock.

Someone from the Association emailed him back the next day and said that the brightly-colored little squawker who visited us is an African Lovebird! There is no breeding population of them here, unfortunately, so our visitor must have been an escapee from somewhere. It certainly was nice to see him. I hope he stays out of reach of all the campus cats!

Meanwhile, we are getting ready for a quick trip to Istanbul and continuing to enjoy quiet summer days here. I'm sure before we know it, it will be time for the fall migration back to campus--the human kind, that is.