Bird Watching 101

People in the United Kingdom who like to watch birds apparently can get quite obsessive about it -- indeed, they have coined a term “twitching” to describe them.

I enjoy watching birds. There used to be a local chapter of the Audubon Society in town, and I went on several bird watching field trips with them, and I spent time sitting in a lawn chair in our front yard watching with binoculars, and I had a friend who enjoyed bird watching and I took her places – and on one memorable occasion when we stopped at an excellent spot in an old cemetery, I found my legs covered in seed ticks – but I was not a twitcher. Most of my bird watching these days is done looking through the windows of our house.

One of the last poems in my Ogden Nash paperback is about bird watching:

Up from the Egg: The Confessions of a Nuthatch Avoider
 
Bird watchers top my honors list.
I aimed to be one, but I missed.
Since I'm both myopic and astigmatic,
Bird watchers top my honors list.
I aimed to be one, but I missed.
Since I'm both myopic and astigmatic,
My aim turned out to be erratic,
And I, bespectacled and binocular,
Exposed myself to comment jocular.
We don't need too much birdlore, do we,
To tell a flamingo from a towhee;
Yet I cannot, and never will,
Unless the silly birds stand still.
And there's no enlightenment so obscure
As ornithological literature.
Is yon strange creature a common chickadee,
Or a migrant alouette from Picardy?
You rush to consult your Nature guide
And inspect the gallery inside,
But a bird in the open never looks
Like its picture in the birdie books—
Or if it once did, it has changed its plumage,
And plunges you back into ignorant gloomage.
That is why I sit here growing old by inches,
Watching the clock instead of finches,
But I sometimes visualize in my gin
The Audubon that I audubin.

I had just read the poem the day before I went to the nursing home to visit the 92-year-old woman from church who is convalescing there from surgery to remove colon cancer but is not recovering as fast as she would like. She wants to go home!

The nursing home has hung bird feeders in front of many of the windows, including hers, and she does enjoy watching the colorful cardinals and the other birds. I was sitting on the love seat under the window sort of at angle and we were discussing the birds. I was half turned around and looking out to my left, and I saw a large black bird sitting on what looked like a tree limb at the edge of one of the buildings, which is barely seen in the photograph from her window. I thought perhaps it was raven because it looked too big to be a crow. Perhaps it was a vulture.

But it didn’t move… and it didn’t move… and so I finally got up and got closer to the class and realized what I was looking at was the profile of a small satellite receiver...

I have trouble with warblers sometimes... 

unless they are mobbing the suet feeder and I can get good look at them...

but I am otherwise reasonably good at identifying the birds I see.

At least I thought I was. Now I’m not so sure.

Same old same old

Weather forecast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning. -- George Carlin

Sometime in the early 1990s, my mother gave me The Book of Days as a present. I am not sure when exactly.  The year is organized in 5-day increments on a page with the date but not the actual day, so it is “perpetual.” Every other page is a painting or a detail of a painting from the National Gallery of Art. It is beautiful.

The first entry that I wrote in it was in 1993, when I noted on September 16 and September 17 that that I spent some time both days digging bulbs and replanting them in the front flower bed. Then on November 6, which would have been a Sunday, I got dressed for church and put on for the first time that year my long gray wool coat that was full of moth cocoons and worms. I had quit smoking by then but was still plagued by "smoking dreams," and I noted a few of those in November as well.

On March 4, 1994, I had cold. On November 4, 1995 I was working in the garden and dug up a toad that had buried itself for the winter and we were apparently having a problem with fruit flies in the house. 

Then in January 1998 I began writing a brief comment about that day’s weather.

• January 6: cloudy, rain
• January 7, temp dropping, rain, possibly freezing rain
• January 8: Snow off and on all day. Not much accumulation
• January 9: snow melted...
• January 20: dry, in the 50’s.

In fact, January 20 was the last day that I decided to keep track of the weather, and I stuck it on a shelf and mostly forgot about it until I visited my sister in September and noticed she was writing scriptures or promises in a similar book every morning as part of her devotion time.

After I returned home, I decided to do the same thing. I have been using the book since January 1 of this year to jot a verse or part of a verse from that morning’s reading that speaks to me in some way (today’s verse: “The Lord is my rock, my fortress, my deliverer in whom I take refuge… I will call to the Lord, who is worthy to be praised…”).

When I saw the weather for today from 1998 -- 20 years later -- I went on the internet to check the temperature (every outside thermometer we have purchased so far has broken so we have given up) in town, and at that time it said 49 degrees.

So I called my friend Judy and asked if she would like to meet me for coffee. Although a friend came and got her on Friday for a doctor’s appointment, she had not driven off her place herself since last Sunday when snow started falling. The back country paved and gravel roads in these Ozark Hills can be very treacherous. Snow plows do not go down these roads, and the snow and ice can linger long after it has melted everywhere else because of the shade and the thick woods on either side. There are a few particularly steep hills between her house and town, and one is particularly dangerous – it is steep and curves about halfway down and deposits you at a low water crossing over a creek. That road is not safe to drive sometimes for days after a snowfall like we had on Sunday.

She was happy to meet me in town and we spent a delightful 90 minutes chatting (and each of us trying to remember what we had just been thinking about before it flew out of our minds) over very good coffee. Coffee that I found was good enough to drink black given that the person who served us forgot to bring cream for mine until I was about halfway done.

Afterward we went to the antique store next door, and I found a nice 8x10 picture frame for $1 in which I put the photograph of my brother behind the wheel of our dad’s pickup truck that he restored, dressed in costume, for his scene as an extra in a movie (I think it was Jersey Boys).

The weather today was about the same today as it was 20 years ago. As the day progressed, the temperature rose to 59 degrees – a welcome relief to the minus 3 the other morning when we woke up. It is lovely to see liquid water in the bird baths and that the snow has melted. It almost certainly will not last, but we’ll take it with joy while we can.

Don't try this at home

Having discovered that the nearly full bottle of cayenne pepper was ruined by mold or mildew or ?, and having gotten confirmation that it was not fit to eat from my dearly beloved, and being unwilling to hop in the car and drive to town pick up some more, I tossed it in the trash and decided to grind up red pepper flakes in my coffee bean grinder as a substitute.

Mistake.

Very bad mistake.

The fumes were immediate and powerful. I am relieved that I did not cough up part of my lung.

I will drive to town tomorrow and buy a new container of cayenne.

To resolve or not to resolve?

My kitchen window faces due East, and in the winter, this is the view I have at about 6:45 every morning.

On this first morning of the New Year it was –1°F when daylight broke.

Yup, it was cold all right when I ventured out to feed the birds. But, it wasn’t too bad compared to other places North and East of here. It could be worse.

I have thought a bit about making some resolutions to put into practice this year. I’ve thought about spending 15 minutes every day cleaning something in the house besides the usual mess in the kitchen. I have thought about making a list of people that I need to pray for and then actually praying for them.

I intend to do both of these things. I feel very motivated to succeed, possibly because these are reasonable goals – small steps – rather than high and lofty goals or resolutions that mean a total upheaval in lifestyle that are unrealistic and that almost always fail. I’ll have to see how it goes…

Our pastor gave a thought-provoking sermon yesterday about the New Year. She adapted three suggestions from Father Rudolph Novecosky’s book Homilies for Everyday Life:

Pull Back: choose 1 day a month to start with to pull back from judging and criticism and send out love instead.

Pick Up: pick up a worthwhile value others have started

Put Down: put down last year’s emotional garbage – hurts, disappoints -- and leave them behind.

Sounds like a plan...