Larks have had a distinct section in the canvas of my thoughts in recent times, mostly stuck on to the sub-conscious tapestry since I see a couple of species a lot while running and the Josh Ritter song, so Paul Simon-esque, starts playing in the head almost immediately… they’re part grumpy and part pensive, these passerines, as they contemplate and go about a life of unspectacular, fidgety forages … if not for their adaptability to anthropogenic habitats, their melody might easily be lost in the symphony of the forest, these songbirds, but as it stands, their symbolism and celebrity in the annals of literature and other arts endures…

‘Twas becoming a rather dull descent from Mount Sinai, the starry treasures of the night and the summit sunrise long gone, the fatigue of a sleepless night now slowly creeping in… the landscape was slowly unfurling its barrenness… on a rather tired impulse, I took out the telephoto lens, having possibly heard or imagined a chirp… lo and behold, the avifauna started emerging from its camouflage… turned out to be about half a dozen desert larks out on a morning forage, scraping the ground with their claws or sifting through it with their beaks for some unlucky arthropod or a seed… it was strangely static and quite, the landscape, despite all the tourist humdrum, as if burdened, silenced by the weight of a rich history and a tumultuous recent past… but these birds brought in some activity, infusing life into what looked like a disillusioned desert…

Desert larks aren’t very sociable… the arid environs do encourage solitude though to be fair, in numbers and in thought… from an empty plot of land amidst sprawling urbanity to foreign deserts, ‘twas the lark that brought familiarity, or a common thread… leaving it to continue its busy forage, I trotted down towards St. Catherine’s monastery, back into the folds of mainstream tourism…

Musing on a Desert lark, Mount Sinai, Egypt