Bird Watching

Have you seen The Big Year? It's pretty good. Has Steve Martin and Jack Black and Owen Wilson. And it's all about bird watching. I guess a 'big year' is a real thing. People that are avid bird watchers go out and try to see as many birds in a year as possible. Sounds fun, right? Well, not to me. I think (or used to) that bird watching is dumb. Birds are birds, what's the big deal.

Then comes Michael.

He was assigned to see as many birds in a semester as possible for a grade. I think he is supposed to see around 200, or close to it. That means he has to put some serious time in the out of doors looking for birds and being able to identify them. Sounds daunting if you ask me. Especially since I just said that I don't care for bird watching that much.

Last semester, someone Michael knew told him about this assignment and that the teacher allows you to remember from your past the birds you have seen. Only thing is, you need to have a permanent list of birds you've seen with the location and date seen written beside the bird. So we got a bird book, a field guide to identifying birds. We also got a bird feeder. That way the common birds you should see all the time would come right up to our house and Michael could actually have time to identify them using his book. The hard thing about bird watching is that a lot of birds are very similar. Like insanely similar. Some of them have this cheek patch or a stripe by their eye or even just darker colored wings or something minute like that. This makes identification, proper identification, much more difficult. Thank goodness we have a camera good enough to capture all these birds.

This is a kingfisher. It's a little (ish) bird that dives under the water and catches fish. The normally have a little mohawk on their heads, but this one just came out of the water and its feathers were all stuck down. Michael saw this at work. 

Once Michael started this assignment, we both got pretty into it. He was using a lot of his spare time to look at birds, so obviously I was sucked in if I wanted to spend time with him too. And I love animals and being outside, so what downside is there really? Along the way, we've seen some really great birds, taken some amazing pictures, learned a lot about birds, and gained a lot of respect for bird watchers.

This particular time that we went bird watching, we went to Camas National Wildlife Refuge. Ivan had a blast running around... for about 20 minutes. Then he wanted to be carried. That was a little difficult. We had enough foresight to bring the carrier for Charlotte. Michael carried her so he could take pictures at the same time. We thought Ivan would just love to be outside and explore. Nope. All he wanted to do was be carried. What a workout for me.

I love Love LOVE this picture of Charlotte! Michael's all busy looking for birds and here I am taking pictures of the kids. 

This is me trying to convince Ivan that riding on my shoulders is fun. This is Ivan trying to convince me that riding on my shoulders is not fun. 

We saw this cute little coyote and Ivan about freaked out! We were in the car by now all buckled up and on our way out. I'm impressed Ivan could even see out of the window to see this guy. He loved it! And he wouldn't stop talking about it the whole way home. 

It's a little blurry, but that's a sandhill crane.