Birds: It’s an Old People’s Thing

This was the very first bird. It was if he’d been sent to convince me that having a bird feeder with a camera that would relay images to my phone was the most amazing thing ever. It worked. After that, his mate came calling, but too briefly for posing.

There is a myth that old people become bird watchers. Released from the scrum of work and children, all us oldsters take to our tiny binoculars and bird books ordered from the Audubon Society along with a t-shirt or a smart, sweetly cocked hat. We are eager for hobbies – vocations, if you will – and those with good accoutrements are especially attractive.

I took up bird watching from our back porch, but I quit after a couple of days. First of all, you have to sit still a long while to wait for the birds to show up. Last summer, though, I will admit, I struck gold by having a chickadee couple move into the decorative birdhouse on my porch railing. I got a million pictures of their coming and going and then hundreds more of the tiny beaks of their offspring, their yammering overheard from yards away. It brought back so many memories from my own, sometimes fraught, child raising life.

The second thing about birdwatching is that you’re supposed to keep track. This is fun, at first, and then there is the inevitable tug of war between what one wishes one had seen and what bird was actually appearing. Is that a peacock? No, it’s a sparrow. So, that gets wearing. Decision-making.

Still, it’s pretty true. Old people are into birds. Including me.

We now own a bird feeder that has a camera along with its own solar panel to fuel the camera and the capacity to link via our beloved internet to my phone where the other morning I sat in bed watching this plump cardinal eating black sunflower seeds. There is a motion detector which alerts me on my phone that something moved in the backyard. Sometimes it is us. All of it is amazing.

Yesterday, the motion detector notification went off on my phone about twenty times during Tai Chi at the senior center. Because we had a very small group, just four, and everyone is very mellow, I could explain that I was being notified that a bird had landed on my bird feeder.

“Oh,” everyone nodded. It’s an old people’s thing.