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It’s a spring morning in Texas in the middle of peak migration.  A flock of birders is collecting in the parking lot of the Boy Scout Woods, one of the four Houston Audubon bird sanctuaries at High Island.  Their colors vary, but mostly stick to a neutral beige, brown or tan in order to blend in with their surroundings.  Their field marks include binoculars and/or cameras and/or scopes hanging from their necks, along their sides or tucked up under their arms.  Some might have eye rings, but most are missing wing bar coloring or crown or median stripes.

This roughly-assembled lot will migrate a short distance en masse to check in and pay their small day use fee (unless they already have their yearly High Island patch, a collectible badge of honor among birders).  The leaders of the bird walk appear, healthy looking fellows from exotic places like Guatemala and Ecuador, and they begin to set the rules and expectations for the walk.  Then the flock returns to their original spot, as the parking lot of this sanctuary is actually a high point in the walk.  Several orioles and tanagers are spotted.

After this, the group migrates en masse to a small field behind the little house that serves as the Houston Audubon’s field office in this little town.  There is a rope that serves as a boundary between the world the humans are allowed to exist in and the world in which only the birds belong.  There are three guides and probably thirty birders standing along the rope boundary with their binoculars raised.  Every few moments, someone would call out a birds name and point.

More often, a person would gesture or say a few words of description, and somehow with this abbreviated type of communication, those cued in nearby would look and add to the descriptions, until the bird guides put it all together into words that everyone could understand.  For instance, one birder says, “fork in the tree”, and a second person might add, “yellow breast”, and then the bird guide says, loud enough for all to hear, “Yellow Throated Vireo, four o’clock, on the right branch of the fork in the second tree back”.  Or, “something’s moving over here” (gestures loosely in a direction), “blue”, “Northern Parula, everyone, three o’clock!”.

Some birds would make the group gasp when they appeared, in mutual excitement and appreciation.  Then, there would be the more rare sightings, excitement evident in the guide’s voice when he rang them out: “Chestnut Sided Warbler, everyone!”, “Yellow Billed Cuckoo, in the back”, “Cerulean Warbler, just dropped down in the back area of greenery”.  Times like these, the excitement of seeing something new would start running along the spine, the message starting in the brain and moving all the way down to the body’s posterior, sending dopamine surges along with it.  During these times, I realized that at this point in my life, these kind of experiences have actually become more enjoyable than sex, more exciting than the prospect of taking off clothes and moving around in conjunction with another human being.  The group bird-gasms from seeing new birds appear, spotting them in the binocs or the scope and getting a good look, were activating my reward center in my brain more than (or at least as much as?) reaching a climax in intimate partnerships.  Is this what happens when you get old?  Is this what happens after three kids and a long monogamous partnership?  Or is this just what happens when you reach maturity?

We don’t have great pictures to show for this excitement, but perhaps you would prefer to imagine your own anyways.  Trust me when I tell you, this experience was definitely worth the journey. 10/10 would do it again.

 

 

We spent the afternoon yesterday exploring a small part of Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge and the Trinity River area.  The daily total was 29 species seen, for a total of 49 for the year so far, not a bad start towards my goal of 200 species for the year.

I did not see the rails I came here to find, but we did have a rare treat while walking along the Willow Trail:  a bald eagle was spotted overhead, and then we spied another eagle sitting at the top of a nearby tree.  It was huge, much bigger than we would have expected a Bald Eagle to be.  It was brown and white streaked, even on the head, not solid brown on top like a juvenile Baldie.  We suspected what we saw was a Golden Eagle, which has been reported over there in that area (although maybe not in January?).  It would have been awesome to have a picture to show for that, but Jason did not bring the camera while we were walking around (what? why?).  Now that I am thinking about it, though, perhaps it was a big red tailed hawk?

We drove around Shoveler Pond (2.5 miles), and it ended up being a slow drive because these two ladies in a pickup in front of us kept stopping to look at the birds with their binoculars.  I get it…that is what we were all doing….but they did not have continuous forward movement and did not use pull outs to move aside for faster traffic.  There was a LOT of stopping and no way around them.

I was feeling some anxiety because my older kids were at home and had some issue with the oven while trying to bake a pizza for lunch – turns out they child-locked it, I did not even know that was a thing – and also wanted to get home to make use of some Sebastian nap time to get things done.  Also, after a bit, it was the same birds over and over again.  Look, more coots, more herons, more egrets…okay nothing to see here, time to move on.  I don’t know what is the proper etiquette for this kind of thing, but I felt like giving those slow ladies a piece of my mind.  At the very end, they finally pulled to the side at one of the pull outs, and then gave us a dirty look while we passed.  I gave it right back!  Thought about adding a hand gesture, too.  I don’t know what that says about me.

I have this idea of exploring all the wildlife refuges within driving distance of Houston this year, and this was a nice start, despite those ladies.

2017 did not go the way I was expecting, at all.

When it started out, I was moving along with the intentions I set forth the winter before: investing time in planning adventures with outdoorsy friends, working on growing my birding year list, trying new state parks with my family, hiking, camping, taking little trips to explore nature, doing a little geocaching and biking here and there – the typical things my family does, usually because this is what I want to be doing.

But then something happened, and I guess really the seeds of what happened were planted in November, with the election.  I had some feelings about the election that I was working through.  I wanted to take the feelings of despair I was feeling and use them for motivation but I didn’t know what to do.  On the way to work, I would typically listen to the Thom Hartmann show, because it came on before one of my favorite programs, Democracy Now.  Thom’s radio show would usually end with some call for people to get involved in our democracy, and he also made some statement that resonated with me about “now is the time to double down our efforts”.  Also, I had this desire to find people in my community who were more “like me”, who thought like I did.

Somewhere in there, I had been spending an occasional Sunday afternoon in a cooking group that I had found via Facebook.  It seems we must have gotten together soon after the election and found ourselves talking about it.  We all realized we were all on the same page with our thoughts. Later, the woman who hosted those events invited me to another group.  We started meeting in homes together about once a month following the Women’s March.

In the spring, the March for Science was happening and I planned to go.  My friend from the cooking club and then the neighborhood club had introduced me to yet another group or two, and next thing I know, I was making signs at the house of another woman, and meeting a few other women from this other new group at the march with our signs.  There were so many new groups forming and so many people to meet, so many chances to get involved.  By the time March rolled around, I had fully become a part of the Resistance.

In the end, I found my tribe through all this.  I became much more interested in these efforts than in the hobbies that I previously was spending my time in.  This is why I wasn’t writing much in here anymore.  I felt like this journal was mostly for my outdoor experiences, and I was having tribal experiences instead.

I made like 50 new friends this year, several of them that I consider my “inner circle” now, and we did so much together.  We met to write postcards, to meet candidates, to hear speeches, to plan events, to support those running for office, to engage voters, to stand up for the things that meant something to us.  We were calling our representatives on a regular basis to voice our opinions.  Some of us were able to sit down with our local reps and talk to them, or be involved in virtual town halls.  We attended rallies and marches together.  We ate and met for drinks together, even howled at the moon together to express our frustration with the political theater and yet our strength in our female pack.  We made signs, hosted fundraisers, listened to (and sometimes critiqued) speeches, and went block walking.  We spent time learning about election strategies from various courses and classes, learned about environmental issues from the Citizens Climate Lobby,  and went to listen to former politicians talk to learn from their experience (Al Gore, Joe Biden come to mind).  Many of those people in the group were getting on the ballot themselves, running for everything from precinct chair to running for Congress.  We were registering voters and working on getting the vote out.  And we will be doing MORE of those things this year, to prepare for the 2018 midterms.

This is a photo from an event I planned in September to bring candidates and voters together.  I was very proud of this event.  This was a helpful kickoff event for some campaigns and helped the candidates get their petitions signed to get on the ballot without having to pay a fee:

I feel like through all of this, I have learned so much about myself, about what matters to other people, about leadership and about politics. This is something that is bigger than any of us as individuals, and it is part of the legacy we will be leaving.  I was so proud to see my middle son decide on his own to write a letter to his Congressman expressing his thoughts on climate change and a desire to move away from the use of fossil fuels, and it was so exciting to see that he got a letter back in response (even though it was full of typical GOP speak).  It has not been in vain, this example we are setting.

There were a few other surprises this year.  I did not think at the beginning of the year that I would be invited to speak at a conference in Connecticut and get to go exploring their wineries with a former colleague and her friend, or that I would end up visiting Reno’s wild horses and hiking in Lake Tahoe, and the trip to Switzerland came out of nowhere.  I still have stories I want to write about that trip.

This coming year, I know a little about where it will lead but not all.  I just found out that I was confirmed to be a speaker at a HUGE conference in Denver in the summer, so I know there will be a trip to Colorado next summer, and that I will visit Bastrop again in the spring, and I am sure I will keep birding, geocaching, hiking, biking and exploring the state parks with my family.  Also, though, I will be keeping the Resistance alive, because it has become a part of me now that I feel I won’t be able to let go.  I know there is a tough fight ahead of us but I really feel like the left has been energized so much through this past year, that there is no way that there will not be a blue wave coming in 2018, and it will be so exciting to feel like I was a part of it.

I still don’t have a pussy hat, though.  😉