Long, Slow Slide into Sad Bunnydom

[akirlu]

I am not a birder. I am not a birder. I am, dammit, most emphatically not a birder. For one thing, I don't keep a little book into which I jot a list of time, date, location, and gender of all the birds I've ever spotted throughout my life so far. In fact, I don't keep a lifetime list of any sort. Why, I own no books on birds or birding. Moreover, I can't sustain monomaniacal obsession for any real length of time, owing to having the attention span of a pithed weasel, and one of the salient traits of birders is a sort of pathological monomania. Still, there are signs and portents that I have a touch of the bird geek in me.

Lise WINOLJ is in town, and there was a small dim sum gathering this morning at 11:00, to breakfast with Lise and see a bit more of her before she wings back to NY. Now, Sunday is my day for sleeping in, and so I only got up at 10:00. Still, half an hour is plenty of time to get from Redmond to the International District, leaving me half an hour to walk the dog, feed the cat, and make myself presentable for company. No sweat, I say. No sweat, except that somewhere in there after the cat had stopped clamoring for her tuna, I sat down to briefly check my e-mail before changing for brunch, and made the mistake of looking at LJ.

Wherein I find that fivemack is in Iceland and saw some ducks there yesterday and wondered what they might be. Somebody else identified them as slavonian grebes because they look grebe-ish and that's the only grebe that's found in Iceland. But the birds in fivemack's picture look nothing like a Slavonian grebe. Wrong coloration, markings don't match, crests don't match, head-shape and beak length don't match. I suppose it's possible to be farther off, but hard if you stick to actual ducks. Still, the damn' birds look familiar -- look, in fact, like something I was looking at recently while trying to figure out what the huge-ass heron I saw in a watery field in Surrey south of Vancouver could have been -- and so I got sucked into re-googling a bunch of bird-spotting pages trying to figure out what it could be. For quite a while I was fooled by the other woman's conviction that it had to be a grebe, but eventually I became convinced it was not a grebe at all, but something else that you can see on Lake Washington at the right time of winter, and sure enough, I'm now pretty sure it's really a red-breasted merganser.

And so I was a good half hour late to dim sum. But I am. Goddammit. Not. A. Birder. Okay? But yes, alas, a very sad bunny indeed.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Merganser is the name of the street two down from us. We live on Spoonbill. Widgeon is between us and Merganser, with Kittiwake on the other side. I can always tell not-a-birders because of the way they find it directionally reassuring when they get close to the house and have the "right sort" of street names.

Slavonian Grebe indeed!

[billzilla.livejournal.com]

Sure looks like a Red-Breasted Merganser to me.
Next time I'm out there, you MUST take me birding; you seem to know a lot of hot spots for a non-birder.... :-)

B.

Re: Slavonian Grebe indeed!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I could swear I'd already said you all should come birding sometime. Perhaps it was only to your somewhat shorter partner in crime that I said it.

Much depends on the time of year. Frankly, most of my bird spotting is done on my morning commute, which takes me across Lake Washington and through the arboretum. In the winter months there's a fairish range of birds right there just by the Montlake cut in the shadow of the UW stadium. Bald eagles, buffleheads and mergansers, wood ducks, some sort of cormorants, coots, loons, great blue heron, and bunches of other weird duckish looking things that I haven't actually figured out what they are yet, plus of course the usual complement of mallards and Canada geese. What kills me is that kingfishers are allegedly pretty common around here, and I've never seen one. But I also know some Real Birders who are local (it's by knowing Tina that I know I am not a real birder), and if you don't mind being kidnapped for the duration, they can definitely take you to prime bird watching territory. The trouble with going out with Tina is that she loses all sense of other priorities -- minor things like whether it's a good idea to stop dead in the middle of the road and start backing up at speed -- once she's in birding mode.

Okay; fine

[billzilla.livejournal.com]

Oh, and by the way, you're either a birder or obsessive/compulsive: which would you rather be, hmmmm?

B.

Re: Okay; fine

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a distinction without a difference, to me. No, I'm not O/C, I just have a whim of iron.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

The only life list I have even remotely is music that I've seen live. LJ has concreted some of that for me, though, what with all the memeage and concert reviews going on.

I'm not a birder, but I don't mind knowing what the heck it is I'm looking at. I think I own three birding guides. I even helped a friend identify an oldsquaw, once (which had ventured far from the Alaskan tundra).

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I'm not a birder, but we do watch the birds at the feeder. Today one of the male mourning doves tried to mount two females, but they both got away.