On FRIDAY, I’ll be talking about how the canyon came to be and why it’s one of the coolest places on the planet. You’ll learn some easy geology and discover, among other things, the tale of my finding the continent’s smallest butterfly in its largest and most spectacular ditch. You’ll also see pretty pictures (unlike that shot of Mr. Dorky up there). More like these:

Blogger’s Note:

Downtown Montpelier is lucky enough to have three independent bookstores, a pleasing blend of creaky wooden floors, informed employees, hand-made signs and a wise selection of titles.

Not long ago, Ruth and I were browsing at Bear Pond Books when she came upon Carl Safina’s latest masterpiece, The View from Lazy Point, still in hardbound.

“Well, I guess I’ll read your copy,” she said.

I looked back with a sheepish grin.

“Oh, right … it’s on your Kindle,” Ruth announced.

Shoppers stopped shopping. Employees stopped working. Their looks were like arrows through my heart. I withered. I shriveled. Right there in non-fiction. It was as if Ruth had announced at a PBS party that I watched Fox news.

Yes, it’s true. I own a Kindle. And it’s finally weighing on my conscience. 

Let us argue no more about the merits of e-ink versus actual ink. You want the tactile experience of book pages? That’s fine. I want all my reading on one portable device. And Amazon.com delivers – all too well, actually, including The New York Times by 5am each morning. It’s the future of news.

I support that future … but I’ll shoot the messenger when it undermines our downtowns and local businesses. My turning point came last month, when Amazon recruited shoppers as spies. It encouraged us to visit local stores, check the price of an item, and use a smartphone app to report the price back to Amazon. Customers who went on to order the item from Amazon.com got a discount.

Vermont has already lost enough home-grown independence in the past couple of decades. Many of our local banks are gone or wholly owned subsidiaries of mega-banks. Our second largest power company is now owned by a Canadian utility (which now wants to acquire our largest power company). Even our home-grown ice cream company has sold out to the global conglomerate Unilever.

Sure, Amazon delivers the goods. But it doesn’t employ my neighbor, who actually works at Bear Pond. Neither does it hold author talks on Tuesday nights, like the talks I myself have delivered at local bookstores around the state.

Merchants know all too well that many customers go window shopping locally but actually make the purchase online. And I think Amazon has taken its marketing model too far. So here’s my plan:

I’m going to replace my Kindle with another e-reader because many independent bookstores are starting to sell electronic books that can be read on anything except a Kindle. I get my e-book and the local bookseller gets some of the proceeds. I’ll also buy genuine books more often because I want independent businesses to thrive. I think I can still remember how to turn an actual page.

And here’s how I’ll take my protest one step further: I’ll do some of my browsing online. Then, when it comes time to buy my book, I’ll turn off the computer, walk downtown and actually buy the book at one of my favorite bookstores.

The multimedia exhibit of photos and histories grew from a memoir-writing project at the Randolph Senior Center inspired by writer, author and all-around-cool-person Sara Tucker. Sara runs memoir-writing workshops at the senior center. Jack’s elegant black-and-white portraits of the 80- and 90-year-old memoirists are a highlight of the exhibit. “These folks were telling stories about people and places I remembered from my own childhood,” he says, “places like the Randolph playground and Tunbridge, where my grandmother lived.”

Also on display at AVA will be paintings by Bethel artist D’Ann Calhoun Fago, a member of the memoir-writing group who turned 94 in December. That’s her painting, the Bootlegger’s Daughter, above. D’Ann will be at AVA for the opening as well. So will Sara and Jack, of course. These are folks you’ll want to meet. I’ll see you there! Below are four of Jack’s portraits (clockwise from left): Cookie Campbell, Margaret Egerton, John Jackson, and Ruth Demarest Godfrey.

DATES: First Mondays of the month (with a few exceptions) from 6:30-8:00pm. This month’s bonus session is TONIGHT: Getting Gulls (yeah, gulls), January 9, at 6:30pm in Montpelier.

LOCATION: First Baptist Church of Montpelier, a block down School Street from the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. Here’s a map.

FEE: $10 per session

“CURRICULUM:” Here’s your syllabus.

The Better Birding series is co-sponsored by the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and the North Branch Nature Center.

I need a new marketing slogan. And I think it might be “Eat More Birds.”

I guide birdwatching trips. No, we don’t eat birds on my outings. We watch birds. You know, ecotourism. But I’m considering the new slogan because Chick-fil-A, whose slogan is EAT MOR CHIKIN, is threatening another Vermonter like me.

Bo Muller-Moore has built a tiny business around the slogan Eat More Kale. Bo prints T-shirts by hand that say, Eat More Kale. He also puts the slogan on little green stickers. Chick-fil-A wants to put Bo out of business.

Kale versus chicken. I guess Chick-fil-A can’t tell the difference between its paltry poultry and a nutritious, leafy plant. My slogan would be easier to confuse with chicken. But that’s the point – and why I like Eat More Birds.

I think it would be great for business – my business – if Chick-fil-A would take me to court. David versus Goliath. Nature Boy versus the Chicken Man. Think of the free advertising.

It worked for Ben & Jerry when they went up against Pillsbury over ice cream distribution in Boston. Remember? What’s the Doughboy afraid of?

It worked for Rock Art Brewery when its Vermonster beer annoyed Hansen Beverage Company, which makes Monster energy drinks.

I hope it works for Bo and his Eat More Kale T-shirts.

And maybe it would work for me too. If I did battle with Chick-fil-A, maybe Patrick Leahy would take up my cause in the US Senate. Maybe my Eat More Birds campaign would get me lots of Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

For that matter, why stop with chicken? I could turn my battle with big business into a cottage industry. Think of the slogans:

“I’d walk a mile for a warbler.”

“Ducks are forever.”

“This bird’s for you.”

“Please don’t squeeze the chickadee.”

Yeah, lawsuits are a gamble, but I’m betting on the free marketing.

What’s really at stake here, of course, is power. Chick-fil-A and its ilk already dominate our landscape with their logos and slogans. They buy naming rights to stadiums and bowl games. They’ve infiltrated our sacred national parks. Their billboards blight much of the nation (we ban billboards here in Vermont). They overwhelm our mass media. And with a gusher of campaign money, they’ve purchased a majority stake in our government and undermined our democracy.

But that’s not enough. Now they’re going after the little guy. They’re going after Bo and his hand-made T-shirts. It’s hard enough to make a living in small business. Hey, I should know. I scrape together an income as a nature guide and a writer. It’s even tougher when you’ve got corporate America laying an egg in your home office.

So, yeah, I might go with the slogan Eat More Birds. Come and get me, Chik-fil-A. What’s the Chicken Man afraid of?

Oh, by the way, the advertising people at Chick-fil-A might need a lawyer of their own. The company’s web site for its EAT MOR CHIKIN campaign, which uses kitchy cows to promote chicken, features videos on a network Chick-fil-A calls “MooTube.”

Google, which owns YouTube, should pluck ‘em for that.

Birds leaping and gliding in flight. Tiny butterflies sipping nectar from a flower. And damselflies making love. These are among luminaries in a premier of my photography at Korongo Gallery in Randolph. The exhibit ends next Wednesday, but I’ll host a closing party on Friday, November 18, at 5pm at the gallery. We’ll have refreshments and we’ll mingle with nature indoors.

The exhibit, titled simply “Wings: Bryan Pfeiffer’s Images from Nature,” is the first formal presentation of my photography. As a field naturalist I see in nature every day the drama of life on earth: birth, awareness, reproduction, struggle, death. And I see beauty. It’s what I try to bring home through the lens of my camera, to share with folks who don’t necessarily work where I work – in mountains and bogs and forests.

Although life in flight constitutes a major portion of my photography, I also bring to Korongo other images from my wanderings outside: a panorama from the Grand Canyon, an elegant scallop on a beach and a tranquil sunset a day after Tropical Storm Irene battered Vermont. I hope to see you Friday.

** FOR THE AUGUST COURSE LIST **

• Photography Fundamentals – Saturday, August 6 / 9am – noon
  Learn the universal rules of photography: shutter speed, lens opening, metering, focusing and flash. People who understand these fundamentals get far more value from my other workshops. So think of this first session as a tune-up for greater things to come.
• Photo File Management – Sunday, August 7 / Mac: 9am – noon | PC: 1-4pm
  You can’t enjoy your photos if you can’t find them. So discover the best ways to organize and locate your images once you’ve moved them from camera to computer. This session works for Mac people using iPhoto, PC people using My Pictures or none of the above. We’ll also discover amazing free photo organization software called Picasa.
• Know Your Camera – Saturday, August 13 / 9am – 1pm
  This essential session demystifies digital dials, buttons and menus. Do you set your camera on “AUTO” and hope for the best? In our class you’ll learn to set your camera for the photo you want. And you’ll recognize when your camera is plotting against you, to misbehave and sabotage your work. Think of this workshop as camera couples counseling.

• Get Your Best Shot – Saturday, August 20
  You and your  camera can have a great relationship, but only if you two cooperate. We’ll spend a half day shooting lots of images inside and outside: people, pets, wildlife, flowers, landscapes, tricky lighting, macro photography, composition and your own photographic “issues” or creative aspirations. The Know Your Camera workshop (above) is highly recommended before this session. This class has two options:
  - Point-and-Shoot Cameras: 9am – 1pm
  - Single Lens Reflex Cameras (with interchangeable lenses): 2-6pm

• PhotoShop Fundamentals I – Sunday, August 14 / 9am – 1pm
  PhotoShop can turn a lousy image into a cover shot. We’ll use the powerful and affordable PhotoShop Elements (“PhotoShop lite”) to add quality and creativity to your images. The dirty little secret among us is that all self-respecting digital photographers edit their images. You’ll see why this software is nothing shore of miraculous.
• PhotoShop Fundamentals II – Sunday, August 21 / 9am – 1pm
  Your next step with PhotoShop Elements includes more ambitious pixel editing, color manipulation and sophisticated tools for creating PhotoShop magic. Every photo on this blog, including the sunset ads for at the upper right of this page, were edited in PhotoShop Elements. PhotoShop Fundamentals I or a working knowledge of the software is a prerequisite for this course.
• PhotoShop Fundamentals III – Sunday, August 28 / 9am – 1pm
  This final session is all about you and your images. For most of the session, you’ll be editing your own images with an instructor looking over your shoulder. You’ll complete your mastery of PhotoShop Elements by learning advanced pixel editing and the benefits of working with multiple layers in your image file. You’ll employ tricks to bring the highest quality and creativity to your work. This class is limited to six participants. Intermediate knowledge of PhotoShop Elements or the PhotoShop Fundamentals II course are prerequisites.

All classes are held in Montpelier.
The fee is $40 for your first course and $35 for any additional courses.

We also share a pot-lunch brunch or supper during many of these sessions.
So we eat well and take good pictures.

TO REGISTER:  Send me an email.

Meanwhile, scroll through some images: