Birding

I’m not a professional birder.  I never will be.  In my mind these people are thin, ancient with hooked-beak noses and translucent skin.  They all have blue eyes.  Rheumy, in a way, from staring through binoculars for hours at a time.  They can walk silently for hours, for miles, days at a time.  They can identify birds by call, by sight, within seconds of seeing a flash of darting feathers flit from tree to tree.  In the shadows.  They make notes, copious notes, and compare them with the notes they made previously.  They remember names.  They would never say Scaup unless they meant it.  They have one or two thousand species on their life lists.  They don’t sweat.  I’m sure there are also fabulously fit, gorgeous birders with binoculars that weigh 50 lbs that can see into bat caves, and these folks, too, can hike for days across desert or mountain without breaking a sweat, or mis-naming a warbler.

I’m sure they’re all very nice.  However, that’s not me.  I’m dumpy and trudge through the woods, and if there is an uphill (especially in altitudes above 2,000 ft) I huff and puff like the big bad wolf.  I often see birds but am also distracted by squirrels.  As well as the amazing, intricate and delicate flowers that line the path of the trail.  I see them because my head is bent down, under the weight of the binoculars and I’m doing everything I can to keep going.  Thoughts of bears flit through my mind - from corner to corner - with vivid images, usually based on the movie “Grizzly Man.”  I hear bird calls, and they make me smile, I love knowing the birds are there.  I feel their presence. But I don’t think that counts on life lists.

Every now and then all the elements coincide and I am standing still, I have my binoculars and a bird alights somewhere out in the open.  And voila!  I can see him (her?) through my lenses.  Up close, the strong beak, the quick, bright eyes.  The strong, skinny feet clutching a branch or a fence wire.  And on a particularly good day while I’m looking the bird will open it’s mouth and sing ... and I’m mesmerized.  I can hear it AND see it.  It is up close and amazingly real.

Real beyond just being there.  Real beyond just sensing it’s presence.

And, a couple of times I have been able to identify a new species while this is happening.  A yelloow-headed blackbird, a western meadowlark, a mountain chickadee.  Mostly, however, I say to myself “small, brown, there’s a stripe there by it’s eye...looks like its in the sparrow family ... maybe warbler...hmmm”  Yeah.  I’m not a professional.

Even in my outrageously amateurish participation in birding (and believe me, all you professionals I’m using that to describe my activities VERY loosely) every now and then I get a deep, gorgeous thrill when I see a bird .... I know it is one I have never seen before ... and from the depths of my memory I hear “Gray Jay” or “Green Winged Teal” ... and I’m right! 

But the thrill is not in being right.  The thrill comes in seeing, in really, truly seeing the bird. Opening my mind, my heart my life to the possibility that some wild creature may cross my path and I actually notice it.  I don’t get anything from it, no picture, no scaling up the ladder of life-lists, no pat on the back, no yummy meat for dinner.

Just a chance encounter with something so unique, so amazing, so complicated and so fabulous.  And all I have to do is stop.  Open my eyes.  And see. 

(This last photo is one that I actually took - and I think it is a Gray Jay ... there was a family of 5 ... and I'm still thrilled!)