Birds are all around us and so are many other small animals but we hardly notice them so busy in our day to day lives. Ok, I don't know about y'all but it was certainly true for me - I lived close to 30 years in various parts of India scarcely noticing any birds and same in US for a long time. In US, one thing I did notice was the scary congregations of huge flocks of blackish brown birds in supermarket carparks. It did seem straight out of Hitchcock's 'Birds' movie. I started living in a proper residential area in suburban Dallas in early 2020, not living in apartments meant being surrounded by lot of trees and greenery. I also started doing my morning walks around the neighborhood and a wooded park area with a lake. This meant I started seeing a lot of birds and as the seasons changed, the birds I heard (happened more than seeing) changed as well. Naturally there was some curiosity and then by chance I happened upon a book in my local public library about birds of Texas. This seemed to be a great chance to go over this with my then 3-4 year old daughter. We continued to be somewhat cooped up at home with very limited outings because of the lingering pandemic. So I used to take her out for walks around my neighborhood and we would try to spot various birds and animals ( which means squirrels, rabbits or someone's pet dogs).
Colorful birds ofcourse were easy to spot, so we would easily spot a somewhat common Northern Cardinal which had a brilliant red color - males ofcourse, with females somewhat drab in comparison which irritated my little girl a lot. Its kinda obvious perhaps but initially I could not explain these things, but reading more about bird life makes it easier to explain some of these adaptations clearly and one can't help but marvel at evolution and nature in general. There was also Blue Jay which was very common and the color makes it easy to notice, we ofcourse noticed crows and an odd Robin or two ( with reddish orange on chest) and mourning doves but hardly saw anything else that easily. I did notice something strange once where a lot smaller birds were making a huge ruckus and a really big bird eventually flew away from a tree near my house. Later figured out this was 'mobbing'. Another major birding moment was when sitting in the backyard of house, I have a patio area which has roof and a wall on one side but is open otherwise and sometimes I sit there and work or read books. One evening, I noticed very small flicker/movement and realized it was a hummingbird visting flowers in the garden.The sight of a hummingbird is very hard to put into words but it is one of those moments when you just marvel at nature for producing something so delicate but so full of life and capable of so many outstanding feats. Just seeing something so tiny and fragile fluttering wins so rapidly, hovering and moving forward and backward just takes your breath away. As I read more about it and learnt about a few different species that visits my area and that this tiny speck of a bird migrates super long distances - it was mind blowing.
Sometime last year I chanced upon this book - Around the world in 80 birds - despite the title or perhaps because of it, I picked it up from library. The author like Phileas Fogg, takes us on a tour around the globe through the pages with each page ( or two at times with illustrations) covering some really interesting birds from North America, various countries in Central, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Oceania. That literally was the take off point for me to dive into more details on life of birds in general and to understand them more.
I considered joining an organized bird walk with my daughter but schedules didn't work out and I figured I'm not that crazy enough to go traipsing around various fields or forests long rides away. So armchair bird reading would do for now and I dived into some well known books like David Sibley's "What's it like to be a bird", "The Genius of Birds", "Bird Sense : What its like to be a bird" among several others to give me varied perspectives of various things related to their anatomy, how they live, migration and to even an exploration of whats probably going on inside their head. The only surprise for me as I look back at this is the total lack of knowledge I had so far and the realization that I'm still scratching at surface as I take all of this in and find out there is lot more stuff out there which is super fascinating.
I also downloaded a super handy and neat app called Merlin from Cornell Lab of Ornithology, you can upload a pic or sound recording and app identifies with satisfactory accuracy the bird. This helped a lot with bird sounds, it helped me understand and map the sound I hear when I'm outside with the bird and infact several times helped me spot the bird better among the tree canopy now that I knew what I was looking for. It was possible to spot Chickadees, Starlings, Barn Swallow, Finches, cowbirds, tufted titmouse and the fantastic Scissor tailed fly-catcher during my morning walks in neighborhood and a tree filled park / lake trail nearby. Lake also was a place to see several types of ducks ( Mallard was the most common), white heron and Great blue Heron.
So why refer to a high school English grammar book in the post title? Kinda hiding in plain sight it is of course also names of a couple of birds seen North America - purple Martin and Wren. I did spot/identify two different types of Wrens ( only thanks to the app which told me what the bird was from sound and then I was able to cross-check it later with description and the big fat bird book I have of birds of America) but the Purple Martin was elusive though I did read about in some of books this year. All the time spent reading about birds and developing a surface level understanding of them was among the best moments of this year for me.
