A Bird in the Hand

This is the Great Backyard Bird Count weekend.  If you are outdoors at all this weekend, take fifteen minutes to look around and see how many birds you can see.  (Better if you actually know what the birds are!  Take a bird book with you -- you can get one from the library -- or, in this day and age, you can probably find everything you need to know on Google.)  Count the different species and then go on the Great Backyard Bird Count website and submit your list.

As always, Daisy and I were up early and walked down to Rocky Point Park (this morning in the driving rain).  We saw lots of birds -- our usual friends, Canada Geese, and gulls (hard to identify what sort of gull they are) and mallard ducks and crows flying in from Burnaby for the day and two trees full of noisy starlings (I know they're interlopers, but it's not their fault, it's ours -- I always remember this story on the news a number of years ago about an old man in a Downtown Eastside hotel SRO who had befriended a starling -- he had a little shoebox in the window for it to nest in and he fed it and it provided him with a great deal of joy because, like all birds, it was pretty {starlings are glossy and speckled and bright-eyed} and had all sorts of funny antics -- it was a lovely story).  We also saw some hooded mergansers (which are less common than the other birds I've mentioned) and the males were doing their mating poses, throwing their big white heads back dramatically to show the females how cool they are.  Daisy wasn't impressed but I was pleased to see a little romance on Valentine's Day.

Valentine's Day can be lonesome for those of us who haven't got a "significant other".  The Stoics would tell us to be happy with what we do have and they are right.  Canada has been chosen the most respected country in the world (along with places like Norway and Sweden as always) -- how lucky we are to live in such a place.  How lucky I am to be able to take my sweet nervous dog to the park and see all sorts of different lovely birds and come home and hang up my clothes to dry in a warm house and have a nice cup of coffee and get a Valentine from my little boy and write in my blog.  Happy Valentine's Day.  Eat something delicious today (think of how amazing it is that we can eat oranges in this cold climate!  when my mother was a little girl, an orange was a rarity), listen to some music, go for a walk and count the birds.  It's all good.