On Saturday I went birding with the South Sound Bird Alliance again, and this time it was raining. Rain is the weak-yet-persistent nemesis of the Puget Sound region. It rains for three seasons a year here, a constant drum and grey that fills the outdoors, leaving us to live our lives indoors. This year was the year I finally bought a high-quality rain jacket, and birding is the first thing I've found that I love enough to endure long periods of standing in the rain. We met up and slowly over the course of an hour or more in constant downpour our group winnowed down to a core of people who loved birds enough that we no longer had the good sense to get out of the rain, because what if a Harris's Sparrow or some other rare delight lurked just around the corner?
A bad photo of a Great Blue Heron we saw.
We did see something pretty rare, at least for winter in Olympia: seven or eight Barn Swallows circling and diving across a field of low vegetation. It took us awhile to identify them, even though many of our group had been birding for years if not decades, because swallows Just Keep Flying Around, which I had been told, but it was great seeing it in person. I also saw my first Lesser Yellowlegs, a shorebird with distinctly yellow legs, which there were a few of hanging around for us to spot.
I didn't get any photos of the cool new things I saw, so here's a photo of a Ring-Necked Duck.
I'm slowly getting used to birding with a group, and this group, particularly the smaller group I ended up eating brunch with afterward at Panera, was one I felt particularly comfortable with. Very nice people who I never once felt weird around (a constant struggle), largely because we all had this one thing in common: a deep fixation on birds. What it is that makes a person into an obsessive birder, the kind like me who go to sleep hearing birdsong they can almost-but-not-quite identify and wake up thinking "I need to read more about White-Throated Sparrows?" I don't know. I've spent long stretches of time obsessing about records or writers or religion, making genreless books that don't sell well, cramming my head full of every piece of information I can find on this subject or that. Anyway, on that walk and the lunch after, it was clear I was in good company to feel like that wasn't such an odd thing.
A white-throated sparrow from my yard today, next to an Oregon Dark-Eyed Junco.
I realized early on that I was beginning every sentence with the phrase "When I was in Arizona," and I apologized, but they made it clear that they did one to hear about it. Later, I even talked about being trans a bit, or at least didn't avoid the subject, something I usually do in mixed company. We ended up talking (some in a more circumspect way than others) about our experiences living under the totalitarian regime we're currently dealing with. About thoughts on leaving the country, going to Canada or elsewhere. Someone had come from Idaho, long a hotspot for Nazi activity, which has only ramped up since Trump first came on the political scene ten years ago, had left to get away from that, as well as to be closer to her kids.
Much like these Wigeons, Coots and Mallards, though we are quite different we are still flocking together? I don't know, whatever, here's a photo I took.
It can take a lot to get a group of strangers to feel comfortable talking about sensitive subjects around each other, and in this case it was an hour or two in cold, pouring winter rain, looking at birds.