If I'd gotten to bed earlier last evening, and if this was not Fantasy Fest weekend, I might be inclined to take a stab at being clever about this first item, to use some of the following soon-to-be-on-the-chopping block words in a sentence, but, well, I'm not. And I would appreciate it if you would stop buttering your toast so loudly.

According to the Times of London, dictionary editors at Collins publishing have produced a list of words they plan to excise from their lexicons because they don't get used often enough.

Amongst them are malison, meaning a curse, caducity, meaning the infirmness of old age, and vilipend, meaning to depreciate or vilify. The word agrestic, meaning rural and rustic, is teetering on the edge, too, in their opinion, which is odd, because it is the name of the gated "community" where Nancy Botwin lives in the TV show Weeds and should be well back in the usage. (A Google search brings up 121,000 entries.)

Also on the list is the word skirr, which means to go rapidly or fly. The aptly-named-to-defend-the-word Andrew Motion, England's Poet Laureate, says the word should stay.

"I'm an active bird watcher," he told the Times, "Birders use this word from time to time." He said he occasionally used the word in his poetry to describe the sound of beating wings. He also said he'd recently seen 100,00 birds flying over a famous birding spot called The Wash in Norfolk and the only word he thought appropriate to describe the noise was skirring.

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I always think of the "just outside of Bakersfield" as where Hunter S. Thompson was when the drugs kicked in in the first sentence of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," but apparently it was just outside of Barstow. Just outside of Bakersfield, which is in California (as is Barstow), is where the Kern River Valley holds their annual Turkey Vulture Festival. Rather than ignore the omnipresent carrion plucking beasts the way most birders do, the folks there, where approximately 25,000 Turkey Vultures migrate past annually, have decided to celebrate them with a morning lift-off watch, a specially commissioned U.S. Post Service cancellation stamp, and a dinner at which Road Kill Quiche and Compost Fruit Salad are served. (At this last event they balk, actually using fresh ingredients.)

The website for the event, which has been held for 14 years at the end of September, lists amongst some fun Turkey Vulture facts that a grouping of TVs is called a wake, and that when a TV stands with it' wings out it is called a horaltic pose, horaltic being a word I can't find in any dictionary, so try as I might I can't blame the folks at Collins Publishing.

We get about 2,000 Turkey Vultures that migrate into the Keys every year. I think it's time to apply for some Tourist Development Council funding.

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You forget sometimes that the rarity of a bird has less to do with the smallness of a population so much as the eye of the beholder and where it is when it is beheld. For instance, there was a small hullabaloo up in Canada last week when a Magnificent Frigatebird was spotted flying over Lake Erie.

Though having lived in the Keys for a while I still can't say that I've never thought of a frigatebird as a ho-hum bird, but I will admit that there have been days when I've seen one wheeling high out over the ocean and not thought much about it as they are a pretty common sight. The northerly frigatebird was a noteworthy enough incident in that corner of the world that there was a story about it in the Windsor Star. What was noteworthy to me wasn't that the bird was so far from its normal Caribbean habitat -- the remnants of Hurricane Ike had just passed into Canada, and Magnificent Frigatebirds often get blown far from their normal habitat by storms -- but the way they described it.

Since frigatebirds tend to spend a lot of time just hanging in the sky, not actively flapping or diving, they are pretty light birds for their size, and I tend to think of them as both as taught and as frail as umbrellas. When I see them drifting by I always think of them as a bird that survives more on finesse than brute strength, and usually a sign of peaceful weather.

The Windsor Star story had an undertone of menace, talking about how the bird darkened one observers boat while he was fishing for perch, stressing the fact that a frigatebird has a wingspan bigger than an eagle's, and describing the creature it a "big, black, imposing bird with a forked tail," which rings a wee bit demonic.

Since frigatebirds tend to move around in the sky, the story noted that there was not a stampede of birders looking to see the rarity. Birders in the area were keeping their eyes to the sky in the hopes of further sightings, though.

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It is an odd but true fact of life that a lot of favorite places for birders are also favorite places for men looking to have anonymous sex with each other in a woodland setting. They tend to be quiet, out of the way spots with convenient parking, lots of bushes, and not a lot of traffic.

Here in Key West we have Little Hamaca Park. You walk down a trail with a pair of binoculars there and you never know what kind of wild life you're going to see.

Near Raleigh, N.C., according the News and Observer, there is a place called Jordan Lake. For about 20 years the New Hope Audubon Society has maintained a nature trail and an eagle observation tower there, and over the years members have filed many complaints about behavior they have observed.

At one point last summer, they said, they counted about 25 advertisements on Craigslist for people seeking sexual encounters, and one day had about 20 cars in the parking lot, all backed up close to the foliage so the license plates could not be easily read.

The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission made several attempts at running sting operations, but decided that their main duties were the enforcement of fishing and boating laws and instead closed off the parking lot and asked the Audubon Society chapter to relocate their tower, which had blown down during a recent storm.

Apparently it was the easy parking that was the key. Activity by both groups there has now subsided, and on Craigslist, according to the News and Observor story, there'd been only one recent ad about the area, which asked, "Does anyone hang out at the lake anymore?"

Mark Hedden is a birding guide and vice president of the Florida Keys Audubon Society. He is owner of Bone Island Bird Expeditions and can be reached at 305-587-6059, or at mark@boneisland.com.