Yellowstone 2001

Tyro...

...is the word of the day from dictionary.com, but I didn't really care for the quotations that went along with it, so I'm going to type out part of my favourite passage that uses it, for my own pleasure.

From Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac:

65290

To band a bird is to hold a ticket in a great lottery. Most of us hold tickets on our own survival, but we buy them from the insurance company, which knows too much to sell us a really sporting chance. It is an exercise in objectivity to hold a ticket on the banded sparrow that falleth, or on the banded chickadee that may some day re-enter your trap, and thus prove that he is still alive.

The tyro gets his thrill from banding new birds; he plays a kind of game against himself, striving to break his previous score for total numbers. But to the old-timer the banding of new birds becomes merely pleasant routine; the real thrill lies in the recapture of some bird banded long ago, some bird whose age, adventures, and previous condition of appetite are perhaps better known to you than to the bird himself.

Thus, in our family, the question whether chickadee 65290 would survive for still another winter was, for five years, a sporting question of the first magnitude.

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Hanging together, Summer 2003