« ice ice baby | Main | wtf, rain? »
May 16, 2006
getting jiggy, but not necessarily with it
When we heard about the unending rain in Seattle this past winter, we were like “Ooo, it’s a good thing we got out of there before all that nasty water came out of sky for a billion days in a row causing everyone to get all sad and twitchy.” Now, the joke is on us as we are currently in the midst of a weeks-long deluge. Just when you think the rain is about to taper off and the sun peek out…KERSPLASHO along comes some more rain to fall on your foolish head.
That is a clumsy segue into this morning’s events, which, though off to an interesting start, ended in a washout. I’ve recently concluded that I need a hobby other than the endless creation and consumption of words, thoughts, theories, strategies, best practices, yammer yammer yammer having to do with communication and technology. Don’t get me wrong, I love all that stuff but I am really starting to feel disconnected from other, more life-affirming fare. You know, like nature.
For a long time, I’ve been buying crap with birds on it. Address books, jewelry, art, t-shirts. Even little wooden birds on sticks that you place on shelves etc. to spruce up the place. I’ve long threatened my fly-fishman husband that I was going to take up birding in my old age so that when he was out standing in some freezing water, I could be tottering around a bog looking at birds and taking notes in little weird notebooks. But the real birds have already been catching my eye. How can they not? Our backyard is like a fricking bird three-ring circus. Every morning there are about sixteen robins, a half a dozen cardinals, mourning doves, red-winged blackbirds, wrens, warblers, finches, orioles and woodpeckers ripping it up out there with songs, games, and laughter. Those guys are having such a great time – they love spring! that I am finding myself wanting in on their simple, avian joy.
My Mother’s day gift this year is a Nikon D50. My husband is being very sweet and supportive of my burgeoning, elderly interest in birding, I think primarily because fly-fishing and birding go together like S&M. Where the birds are is where the fish are and vice versa, so my new hobby would guarantee him decades of fishing vacations. For another thing, I will no longer be able to make fun of him for getting giddy over tiny, googly doll eyes and chartreuse and hot pink feathers. My nature-peeping pot will be way dorkier than his fly-tying kettle.
This morning was going to be my first attempt at looking at birds as a hobby. It started off promising: some orange bird I hadn’t seen before totally sang the American Top Forty from a tree as I was loading the Bean in the car. But after I dropped Bean off at daycare, got my coffee, and drove to the bird sanctuary just a few miles from our house, the light “birder-friendly” sprinkle had turned into a veritable monsoon. I tried to wait it out in the birdy gift shop, where I picked up a copy of Sibley’s Birding Basics, a reference chart of Rhode Island birds, and a copy of this very cool magazine. I had never seen this magazine before but seriously any magazine that has an article beginning like this is a friend o'mine:
The most common words I hear spoken by any environmentalist anywhere are, We’re fucked. -- Derrick Jensen
I'd like to know what we can do because there’s a lot of birdies in the world that I want my son to be able to look at one day when he is ancient like me. Even the rain, which sent me home instead of into the woods, feels like an omen that things are not right in the world.
Posted by Max at May 16, 2006 11:11 AM