Hey tweets, once upon a time, there was a birder who in all other
respects led a more or less normal life. (Not to say that birders
aren't normal, but really, you must agree we do exist on the far end
of the bell curve when it comes to our passion.)

Now, this birder inhabited a more or less normal house, had a more or
less normal job as a writer, drove a more or less normal car, and was
married to a more or less normal husband who (I admit) sometimes got
nutty ideas about cleaning mud out of drain pipes with possible
snapping turtles lying in wait inside. But she figured she had her own
quirks too, and who among us can or should cast the first mud pie at
each other?

Every day when the weather was fine, and also on the days when the
weather was horrible - in fact, on every day - this birder bundled up
her camp stool, put on her birder's harness, snapped on her
binoculars, and went down to the Fill. She saw many wonderful
creatures there, not just birds but also fellow birders. Sometimes she
saw rare sights, like the beautiful WHITE-THROATED SPARROW who arrived
yesterday and came out again today to perch near the dog poop sign on
Surber Drive and sing until his song filled the neighborhood with
celestial music; or like the two RED-BREASTED MERGANSER females who
swam alongside their bigger cousins on the lake, making it easy, for a
change, to tell them apart; or like the four PEEPS who took one look
at all the dogs and people circling the Loop Trail and fled into the
sky, never to be seen again, unfortunately before the birder could
figure out whether they were least sandpipers or westerns or something
even more exotic from faraway lands.

Nevertheless, although this birder spent more time at the Fill than
anyone else in living memory had ever done, and despite the fact that
she walked around and around the trails until most people's heads
would get dizzy and they would fall down and moan for relief, and
regardless of the fact that she got there at dawn every day (even when
the dawn comes before most people's newspapers do, assuming they still
get home delivery), and notwithstanding the fact that she has almost
worn out her camp stool from sitting on it for so long as she stares
out at the bushes and ponds and fields - despite all these things,
this birder misses some of the birds who come to the Fill, birds like
the Eurasian Collared-dove who touched down yesterday and seems to
have disappeared into the black hole from which it so briefly popped.

Therefore, the birder has decided there is only one thing to do: she
must move in and live at the Fill around the clock. I hope there is no
ordinance against it, but since there probably is, she will have to be
nippy about avoiding detection. - Connie, Seattle

constancesidles at gmail.com