Jon and I have been friends for a quite a few years.  We met while students at CWU and were roommates for a while.  Jon studied science and education while my major was in economics.  As you can imagine, our opinions were often quite different.  Occasionally Jon and his “science friends” would go bird watching and I would make fun of them.  I would call them such humorous, and original, names like Tree Hugger and the Flannel Shirt Gang.  We definitely had our red state/blue state moments back then. 

We still get together often and he was the first person I called when I started thinking about buying The Wild Bird.  I knew he would have some insight into the bird scene and I wanted to enlist his aid as a part-time birding tutor.  Since then, Jon has taken Nancy and me birding a few times.  It has really made me change the way I view bird watching.

One of the first things I noticed was that getting good at bird identification would be next to impossible if you didn’t have someone more experienced to help out.  Jon knows the identification points to look for and can usually ID a bird pretty quickly.  I on the other hand, look at the bird, put my nose in the field guide, and then up again only to find that the bird has moved.  It really helps to view a bird through your binoculars while having someone next to you explaining the points you should look for.

Secondly, I love the way birding forces you to expand your area of awareness.  You have to take notice of the sounds behind you and movement at the edge of your vision.  A birder will miss so much if he only pays attention to what is directly in front of him.

I also greatly appreciate how it is an activity that allows friends and family to spend time together.  Birding gives you those quiet moments where each of you are looking at a bird and debating it’s ID.  You get a chance to converse, exchange knowledge and joke without a lot of the external stimuli that infect our normal days.  Then, at some point during the day, you can all gather at a nice café or picnic spot to eat and visit.

Finally, birding gives us another reason to walk away from our daily lives for a short while and re-visit nature.  Not only that, it can be a very low-tech activity with none of the paraphernalia of a ski trip or round of golf.  You can have a great day of birding with nothing more then a field guide and a decent pair of binoculars.

So, come on by The Wild Bird if you are interested in birding but not sure where to start.  We can point you in the right direction.

 

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