The birds, the birds, the birds. I don’t really know when it started but suddenly a few years ago I began being a person who likes birds. Not in the absolutely unhinged way of a beshitted person who owns a cockatiel or an insipid little blue thing with a rubber cement applicator beak that makes kissing noises on certified viral tiktoks, but just in the way of Marge Simpson holding a potato.

You always have something to watch when you like to watch birds. I haphazardly take binoculars to the river, as often as I take my Real Camera, a novice’s entree Sony alpha 2012 something or other. I think sometimes that I should get a Real Lens, something long and sáfarique, but I am shocked to find out that for my now extremely long-in-the-tooth real camera, a real lens will still cost a real $1500. So I content myself with spotting and snagging with my iphone the occasional wild thing on the river: the random night heron, the darting hummingbirds, my beloved annual fledgling osprey.

Months ago I walk the river with John’s parents on a coffee errand. We come across a gentleman with a telephoto pointed at a run of the mill, regular-degular, boring-ass, one-of-10-dozen resident snowy egrets, and he turns to me and says authoritatively “That’s a snowy egret.” and I want to slap the shit out of him. Of course it’s a snowy egret, you absolute imbecile, you dolt. A horse! he may as well say, pointing. My impotent passions and milquetoast fascinations are precious and wondrous, but hold a mirror up to me and I! will! attack!

A few months ago I snag a last minute spot at a local falconer’s demonstration. I follow this falconer not only for bird reasons, but for horny reasons as well, so it’s a real-two-for-one and I do love a bargain. I stand with nine other people and we take turn holding two of three birds: a barn owl, a harris’s hawk. I am keenly aware that this hot falconer is bored as hell, keenly aware of his auto-pilot delivery of terms and cautions and factoids, and keenly aware that I do not care even one little bit because holy shit I am holding an actual owl oh my absolute god I see the owl and it looks at me. It’s face is a perfect porcelain dish made of feathers so fine and delicate that it literally does not seem possible, the smooth velvet white dissolving at the edges into hundreds of flawless fish-scaled feathers no bigger than a sunflower kernel a piece.

I wouldn’t call it life changing and yet was my life not changed?

Cut to now as I buy millet and black oil sunflower seeds in bulk for the camera feeder in our backyard, and anniversary gift from John. And I always have peanuts in my pocket. Crushed kernels for my girls at the coffee shop, whole unshelled for the crows on the river. I find myself having an ear tuned at all times now, aware of the chatter and the delightful comb calls. The other day I sip my coffee and hear something altogether different and see a local mating pair harrying this entirely nonplussed red tail hawk above me on the power line. I am Oren Ishii spectating at the foot, cheering them on.

“Wow they really just come right up to you!” says a familiar barista as I wait for my coffee outside. Later a woman stops in her tracks when she sees one take a bite right from my hand. Last weekend, Marcus and I take our drinks on the banks of the river, and he gasps when he turns around and sees a dozen or so of the house finches waiting patiently directly at my back. I am intolerably fucking smug about all of this.

At home, on the camera, we are at well over 150+ notifications a day as the house finches come and go, triggering the motion sensor and pinging my phone directly. Sometimes they are security cam frozen: bickering kids at the lunch table; sometimes they are too fast for the scanning sensor: biblically accurate seraphim, all wheels of wing.

“I just think they’re neat!”