City Birdwatching
I adored (still do) birds. I would climb the only tree in the yard and sit quietly with my binoculars and bird book, memorising the breeds, species, and ticking off what I had seen. In the winter I'd sit in the kitchen window after spreading seed with my binoculars again and watch my favourite bird, the Junco. It was not winter without my beloved juncos. Chickedees, meh. Cardinals, blah. Juncos...now THAT'S a bird. Don't ask why; it's impossible to understand an 8 year old, even if you were that 8 year old, but I'm still partial to Juncos.

This was all brought back to me as I read Julie Zickefoose's awesome book, Letters from Eden. It didn't give me the desire to run out and buy an 80 acre farm built specifically for nature, but it certainly gave me the desire to use those new binoculars that I haven't hardly used since I received them, dig out my bird book, and take a walk at Eagle Creek. I used to keep a bird feeder in front of my window, but *gasp* the birds have this natural subsequential issue of plooping on the sidewalks! We can't have that! Seriously, all my neighbors bitched because my feeding of the birds was causing plooped up sidewalks. One of our neighbors actually caught and terminated chipmunks and small squirrels. I momentarily fantasized catching and terminating her bratty 4 year old. Thus, my desire to perhaps have more space and privacy to bring the birds to me. Anyway, Zickefoose is a fantastic writer, bringing nature alive to the reader. My first introduction to her as a kid was reading the Bird Watcher's Digest and seeing her illustrations.

I definitely need to get back out and start bird watching again, in my wonderfully amateurish way, especially since winter birds are my favourites.