My earliest adventures in Nature were fishing, mainly salmon fishing. There were good days and there were bad days. When you’re four years old and you’ve gotten up in the middle of the night and sat still for four hours and still haven’t caught anything, it’s an extremely bad day. Luckily, dad had a solution for that; if we’d been skunked, we would go catch bottom fish. In those days, bottom fish were plentiful. So, even if we didn’t catch the salmon we’d gone out for, we went home happy. I might even have spent the rest of my life fishing if I hadn’t gotten seasick so often.
Luckily, I discovered birding after I retired and it is a lot like fishing, without the accompanying seasickness. There’s a lot of sitting and waiting in both sports. Unfortunately, if you choose the wrong time or the wrong time chooses you, you may not see the birds you had hoped to see and you’ll end up mainly seeing birds you could have seen 600 miles closer to home, like this male Northern Shoveler
this male Cinnamon Teal,
or, even, this Greater White-Fronted Goose.
Luckily, though, there are often moments like this where hundreds of Dowitchers decide to circle
and land right in front of you, almost as if you were simply just another part of Nature, not merely an intruder in their world.
Moments like this can easily make you forget that you drove 650 miles to get here and have been a little disappointed by what you’ve seen so far.