Resplendent Limits

 "Who names the birds? And why the Latin name in parenthesis? As if Pharomachrus mocinno was the real name, but we monolingual English speakers have to have it transcribed into something we can understand." 

    "But even then, there are problems or, at best, inequities. The aforementioned Ph-- Mo is, in fact, the Resplendent Quetzal. Well, there's a bird worth getting up for, worth walking to the window to gaze at in wonder, to tell your friends you saw and, in these days of a camera  in every pocket, to take a picture. And how did the obviously foreign Resplendent Q get to Minnesota? Not the bird itself, of course--too resplendent for ordinary folks like us. But even its existence--how do we know about it?"

"Well," she paused in her morning monologue, looked to see if he was listening. He was or, at least, appeared to be.

  "Well," she said, and turned the page of her Bird-a-Day calendar, "Well, it is followed by a normal bird, the Yellow-throated Warbler, a squat, plump species well-suited to northern climes and, no doubt, more comfortable on my desk. A bird we might actually encounter, get a glimpse of on a short walk, or, better, see on a hike in the woods. An ordinary, but pleasant, encounter."

"Hmmm," he said.

"But, the Resplendent Quetzal! That would be like drinking Chardonnay and eating chocolate torte (what really is a torte--just a fancy cake, right?)...eating a chocolate torte for breakfast, then feeling queazy for the rest of the day."

She paused.

He appeared to be listening, had lowered his tablet, maybe even turned it off, and was waiting.

"Well," she said. "We'll never see it. Probably foreign."

"Or worse yet, a migrant."

"Yikes! Obviously illegal," she said, and threw the Resplendent Q, now crumpled into a paper ball, at him. "Your problem now."

He caught it, did his practiced pantomime of eating and swallowing it, and they both went back to reading the news of the day.