Hey tweets, Wasn't yesterday a glorious day to be outdoors? The puffy clouds
and blue sky looked so spring-like, and the sun was actually hot as it beat
down on my shoulders. Now, before a bunch of you write me back to point out
that yesterday was the first day of spring so *of course* it was entirely
appropriate that the day be spring-like, let me just say that until the
warblers arrive, it is not wholly spring to me. In fact, yesterday was the
kind of day when I get just a little impatient with Mother Nature: c'mon,
c'mon, hurry up, where are the warblers?

As if to compensate for the fact that big-time migration is still a couple
of weeks away, I did find a very odd swallow perched on the dead snags near
the old dime parking lot pond (southernmost pond). It was rough-winged brown
above and dirty white below, with a partial bib and a forked tail. Be still
my heart: not having a National Geo with me, I was free to speculate. Maybe
it was a rare swallow from who-knows-where, a first for Washington. The
elusive Celebes swallow, perhaps, or the thought-to-be-extinct Vladivostok
martin (note: these are alternate-universe species alive in my brain and
probably nowhere else). The bird obligingly opened his tail, which was
barred across nearly every feather. Whoa. At that moment, the swallow held
every possibility of birding that makes my heart soar - a mixture of
treasure hunt, puzzle, awe, and a kind of Jed Clampett-like "gowrsh, Granny,
what the heck is that?" feeling.

I have been struggling to articulate in my own mind why nature is so
important to me. E.O. Wilson, the Harvard sociobiologist, calls it biophilia
- love of nature. He says it is innate in humans, which really isn't much of
an explanation.

Hal Opperman came out to the master birder class the other day and gave a
most thought-provoking lecture about the meaning of birding. He asked us to
divide ourselves into four groups and make a list of why birding is
meaningful to us. In our group, we listed things like companionship (we like
to bird with others); renewal (we like to take a break from the rat race);
spirituality, etc. We had more than 20 such items on our list. So when I
went to the whiteboard in front of the room to write down our list, I headed
it with "It's all about us." Hal got a good laugh out of that, so much so
that when another group put down "conservation and saving the environment,"
he said they were pandering to him. That made us all roar.

Of course it begged the question: saving it for whom? Why, us, naturally, so
we can keep enjoying it. Actually, I'm being a bit unfair. I know there are
people who truly believe that it's worthwhile to save the environment minus
the humans, but these are people out at the thin edge of the bell curve,
right where you think the curve is going to touch the x-axis but it never
quite does.

Most of the rest of us are species-centric, as probably all species are. So
maybe the best we can aim for is that we bring to the conscious level the
meaning of nature to us. In other words, each of us should know why nature
and birding are meaningful. Perhaps if all of us, not just birders, kept in
mind how much we love and need nature, we might connect the dots more often
when it comes to making every-day decisions about such things as politics
and purchases. Or maybe, on a less preachy level, we might get ourselves out
into nature a bit more often instead of plunking down in front of the TV.
Oops, that's preachy too. You see how testy I get while I'm waiting for
warblers.

The swallow, I concluded, was a young barn swallow, which in no way
diminished its wonderfulness. Here's what else I saw yesterday:

pied-billed grebe
double-crested cormorant
great blue heron (perched on the tree swallows' wooden house pole, much to
their disgust)
Canada geese (including even more teeny cacklers than usual)
gadwall (no mallards!!)
green-winged teal
American wigeon
northern shoveler
ruddy duck
canvasback
ring-necked duck
greater scaup
lesser scaup
bufflehead
common merganser
hooded merganser
American coot
killdeer
glaucous-winged gull
bald eagle
red-tailed hawk
rock pigeon
Anna's hummingbird
belted kingfisher
tree swallow
barn swallow
American crow
black-capped chickadee
Bewick's wren
marsh wren
American robin
European starling
yellow-rumped warbler
song sparrow
white-crowned sparrow
golden-crowned sparrow
red-winged blackbird
American goldfinch
house finch - Connie, Seattle

csidles at isomedia.com