dropping out into the deep indigo sea

Apparently Beagles is plumb tuckered after his journey over the river and through the woods.  I know how he feels, a day with the family can be pleasant but it is also exhausting.


So when we were last with the dogwhales they were spreading deeper across the continental shelf, much like our forefathers moving on when the smoke from the nearest settler's chimneys became visible, and have glimpsed the depths with their siren song.  And perhaps it entered their brains that it would be pleasant to turn on, tune in, and drop out: turn on to the siren song of mother nature, tune in to the currents of the deep and endless sea, and drop out of the rat race of hunting up food whenever their stomachs growled.  But still they would have to eat something,

And here is where krill came in.  I had thought krill were microscopic, but wiki tells me that they are teeny tiny shrimplike things a few millimeters in length feeding on microscopic plants and animals, stuff too tiny for bigger animals to eat so they sort of convert this dust into  bigger chunks, still too small for the big teeth of a dogwhale.  It must have taken some time for them, some trial and error, to come up with baleen, but when it was perfected it was like having a net in your mouth,  It is unclear to me if baleen whales open and close their mouths, but I'm guessing probably not, they just slurp up in the krill. 

I'd have liked to have thought that the baleen whales just cruised through their food, so like they didn't even have to think about it, but apparently krill are swarming animals so they have to hunt up swarms.  I'm going to take a big leap of faith here and assume that it's not that much trouble.  It's not like you have to sneak up on a swarm of krill, you just cruise up to one and then through it.

I like to think that they're minds are free, free to think deep thoughts as they cruise the depths, flying without the need to flap wings constantly or search out a rising current, between daytime and nighttime just by rising and falling. 


Kind of in the doldrums here, the Sargasso Sea between the holidays, barely in 2019, almost into 2020,  New Years Eve, I am guessing it was the same for Beagles as it was for me, since we were so close in space and time, God knows what it was like in the faraway north side for Old Dog five to ten years later, but we had an array of noisemakers and when the clock stuck exactly twelve we were out onto the front porch banging away to beat the band, and so were the people in the next porch and the one after that.  It is a sweet memory.