Recently chatting with my sister as her husband and I plan our upcoming falconry sessions and casually joke about us getting older and spontaneously getting into birds and she looks at me and says “Spontaneous? You’ve been a bird freak for… a while.” And a few things suddenly slap me in the face: I have a ten-inch tattoo of a magpie on my arm that is now about 10 years old, and based on my personal identification with the bird that goes back to my childhood. I see a turkey buzzard circling over head recently and remember camping under the oaks on center street in Provo for hours 17 years ago to watch their enormous committee hanging over the street, two dozen birds strong, annoying all my roommates with reports from my obsessive observation. And then there’s my eagle scout project, hanging ironically like a 26 year old albatross around my neck: sourcing, securing and spreading 12 tons of nesting material to establish a riparian preserve for 50+ species of migratory birds in Arizona that is now a major ornithological destination.

This is like when my psychiatrist asks if I consider myself an anxious person, or if I struggle with anxiety, and I truthfully and enthusiastically answer “No, not really! Anxiety’s never really been a problem!” and she looks at my medical history that I gave her not 10 minutes earlier and says “But you take Xanax anytime you fly to manage panic attacks, and have been hospitalized in the ER twice for anxiety episodes that manifested as full-blown cardiac events?” I guess if you put it that way.

Anyway, all this to say that I’m very excited that the crows and ravens are finally back. In January I had a good thing going: daily trips to the river at 3 to feed the birds, where they’d all but eat out of my hands. I got them to come when I called and could pick out individuals, and when I showed up they’d come congregate. I was living high on the fucking hog, and then suddenly… mating season, nesting, and they all vanished.

Seven long months later and the pink-mouthed fledglings are out making a racket, and their folks are taking them down to the river to scrounge and learn the ropes. I’m heading back out semi-regularly now to start to make their acquaintance. My goal this year is to get them taking food from my hands (as they’ve been doing for 30,000 years, calm down.)