I recently read an essay from The New Yorker magazine, published in 2023, and I could relate. The essay was titled, “Your Slow and Sad Descent into Bird Watching.”
The title of the essay, more than the typically sarcastic New Yorker article, captures the way my summer has gone. I’ve been watching birds, a lot of them. Due to unforeseen medical issues, that’s about all I’ve been fit for.
Normally, I’d mostly be fly fishing during my summer off from teaching. That’s at least how it started. I posted grades on graduation day and headed out the following morning for Kalispell to visit my daughter and fish a few of our old, favorite haunts. The weather in the Flathead had been unseasonably warm and I anticipated a fun week.
Then, of course, Montana weather happened. Things came around eventually, and on an abbreviated day trip to Duck Lake I managed a pair of rainbows. That brace now looks like it will be the sum total of my fishing exploits for the summer.
My right shoulder started acting up on that trip, but a week later, after I spent a couple days trying unsuccessfully to convince a carp to play, the pain in my shoulder flared up so severely if I’d been given the option of amputation with assurances I’d receive certain relief, I would have considered that deal.
The initial diagnosis was a rotator cuff tear, an injury that requires surgery and lots of rehab. Significant in my case was that typing might be off-limits for a month or two during recovery.
I’ve long thought one of the features of being a writer and teacher was that I could keep working so long as I don’t lose my marbles — hold the “You wanna tell him, or should I?” jokes — I just never considered not being able to type.
Fortunately, I received a reprieve of sorts when an MRI revealed the rotator cuff was fine, but I had a slight fracture in my humerus right at the shoulder. So, surgery was off the table, but I still faced a summer-long ban on fly fishing and hence, my descent into bird watching.
Bird listening is a more accurate description. There are plenty of birds in the yard, but with my big maple leafed out it’s not always easy to see them. I can hear them, however, and I now have a more accurate way to identify the source of all the chirping and squawking coming from the tree.
A lot of nascent birders have learned to rely on the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology All About Birds website. If I need some quick bird info for a column or social media post, it’s my first and usually last stop. I just learned the lab also has an app you can add to your phone that IDs bird calls. It’s been around for a few years, but I didn’t stumble on it until this spring.
Now I have a sound-ID substance abuse problem.
In the mornings while I make coffee I turn on the app and set it in the window. My record so far for the coffee brewing choir is 16 bird species, though I’m a little dubious about the northern mockingbird who keeps popping up in my list of recognized calls. All About Birds indicates my home on the Great Plains is at the very northern extent of the species’ range, which has been expanding northward for years, so maybe.
I’d love for mockingbirds to move in. The summer soundtrack of my youth was Vin Scully calling the Dodgers and mockingbirds with their all-night jam sessions.
I doubt sound ID will replace hunting, but I did get excited the other day when I turned on Bird ID while on a river walk and recorded a desperate bobwhite quail looking for love.
My descent, you see, is nearly complete.