So Worcester lost to Louisville on Saturday night, 4-0, completely shut down by Louisville pitcher Zachary Osborne's masterful performance on the mound. Oh, well. It was a good run for Worcester, whose improbable ride to contention for the Little League Championship was just the antidote for a Red Sox Nation staring down the twin barrels of a possible players' strike and a sputtering team that was playing .750 ball going into Memorial Day weekend. Win or lose, the "Worcester 13" won.

My lunchtime walk around the Fens this afternoon yielded two surprises - first, I found myself within a stone's throw of a heron, and a big one at that. He had been stalking the shallow stagnant waters, and froze in mid-stride as soon as he noticed me noticing him. We stood there for about five minutes, me trying to creep closer for a better look, the crane tilting his head ever so slightly this way and that, still motionless otherwise, as he tried to feel out my intentions. Passersby must have thought I was a total nut-case, or practicing some very odd variant of Tai Chi. Either way, they definitely kept their distance. Surprise number two was a pair of turtles, one about five times larger than the other. The little turtle was swimming directly behind the big one, occasionally doing barrel rolls off to the side but always staying in close proximity to the big one. A mother turtle and its baby? Do turtles do the child-rearing thing? Up until this point, the only time I'd seen multiple turtles in the wild was when they were all sunning themselves on a big rock, or fallen tree branch (like they do in the Fens on sunny days). Very strange, but again a sight that I just couldn't tear myself away from. Wildlife can be such a distraction sometimes...

Right now I've almost read my way through Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. What a great little book!