Yesterday I got three life birds (common merganser, cooper's hawk, downy woodpecker) at two different parks in the Allyn/Belfair, WA area. Here's what they look like:
Common Merganser
Downy Woodpecker
Cooper's Hawk
The Downy Woodpecker is nearly identical to the Hairy Woodpecker but just cuter and smaller (the beak is a dead giveaway). The Cooper's Hawk is very close to the Sharp-Shinned Hawk (a bizarre name, idk what it means) but this particular Cooper's Hawk sat perfectly still in range of my binoculars and politely waited for me to look up photos and descriptions to identify him (look at phone, look into binos, look at phone, into binos, etc). I also had [url=https://forums.goblinmode.com/viewtopic.php?p=843#p843]an intense encounter with a bald eagle[/url] and saw a ton of them, which was amazing. They're really impressive animals.
When I was a kid my dad would drag me out super early in the morning to go fishing. He'd go rain or shine and sometimes (because I didn't have a choice) so would I. I honestly hated it. It was a lot of sitting around doing nothing and I wanted to be home playing video games. My dad really saw it as this bonding thing. And in a pretty gendered way--he did take my sisters, but was fine when they didn't want to go. I think I, being the youngest and "male" was the one he really hoped would be into it. All the men in my family fished--grandpa, uncle, dad, brother in law. It was that and Indiana University basketball. I didn't care about either. I cared about Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII.
These days I find myself caring a lot less about Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII and a lot more about getting up before sunrise and going to stand in the rain in the middle of the woods, or by the side of a pond or a marsh. I would probably enjoy fishing a lot more now, but as I got older I never liked the whole "man vs nature, kill to eat when you can buy it at the grocery store" philosophy. And "catch & release" really means "gouge a huge hole through the side of its face with a hook and then make it live like that." I was a vegetarian for ten years. I just don't think I could ever be a passionate fisherman (or fisherwoman for that matter), even if I had to do it for food, it would be just for that, not for the joy of it. But there is some thread, some reinvention of the same thing my dad loved about it that I feel like I've been able to pursue through birdwatching. There's a whole natural world out there that still exists IRL despite the feeling like everything exists in computers now. Living 40 minutes from anyone else I know means I have to do something to keep myself from becoming an entirely computer-based being (I even read books on an ereader now :oops:) and this is it. I thought I would be too ADHD for it, but I'm not. I love it. It brings out a patience in me because I just love it. I love playing where's waldo with a woodpecker among a million douglas fir trees and I love getting to stare at some mottled brown duck and try to challenge myself to figure out what the hell it is. I love it enough to get up before sunrise to stand in the rain and do it. Which is something beautiful about myself that I hadn't discovered before this year, and it makes me wonder what else there is inside me that I haven't found yet after forty-something years.