Birding, aka birdwatching, is a recreational hobby where you try to see birds. Other words you may see associated with the hobby are birdspotting, twitching, listing… there are a lot of ways to go about looking at birds! But the basic gist of all these subcategories is:
“Birders” like me are proactive, visiting promising sites to see what may turn up. We are thrilled if we come across species less familiar to us, but we are also capable of spending half an afternoon watching a larks’ nest in a field, observing the parents come and go along a grass tunnel, feeding their young.
That’s how I started—watching the common sparrow. I woke one morning as a boy to find myself paralyzed down my back—very frightening at that or any age. The doctor diagnosed rheumatic fever, and prescribed resting all that summer, in bed. When the weather was good my mum would put a camp bed in the garden and I’d spend the time there. Looking up I watched the sparrows under the eaves of our house, courting, lechering, chattering, bringing in long wisps of straw or grass for their nests, then later feeding their young and teaching them to fly.
A friend down the road lent me a bird book his family had. By today’s standards it would be considered an amateur job, lacking altogether the detailed depiction of plumage with pointers to the diagnostic marks, the precise description of note, song, and habitat. But what the pictures in its pages did do was reveal the mystery that was lying all around me unnoticed, waiting to be discovered. At the end of the garden there would be blue tits hanging under twigs like acrobats, perhaps a song thrush’s nest with blue eggs, and in the woods down the road there would be migrants that had flown from Africa, tiny bundles of fluff, warblers, navigating in ways that are still little understood.
How come the Arctic tern crosses the globe from north to south and back again annually; that adult cuckoos migrate before their offspring, which nevertheless know how to follow them; that after young swifts leave their nest, they may not land again for several years afterwards?
The world is full of marvels, and some of them are closer than you think. I was hooked. I still am.
This movie is so historical romance stuff but it’s more like
Carey mulligan rejects men who keep offering her pianos because, well, she has a piano and she doesn’t need men.
