Getting Started

“Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” – Arthur Ashe

I am at a new beginning, again. Sitting on the wet ground near the water at our local county lake, watching the sun rise in the fog of the first cold front of the season.  For seven years I came here every day and then the pandemic happened. For the last five months I have found a second home in my neighborhood park. Now I am slowly venturing back, ready for the coming of fall migration.

This lake has been a place of new beginnings for me. I was here when the lake was “born” so to speak, participating in a Camp Fire Girls hike through what was the bottom of the lake in sixth grade. I didn’t think much about nature then and I don’t remember even noticing the lake again until I moved back to the area in my thirties for a new job, a new beginning. To be honest, I barely noticed the lake then even though I bought a house a half mile away. I saw the lake - from the golf course - but nature had not called to me and I was busy with other things.

Ironically, I first discovered the lake when I was selling that house, another new beginning. I started walking on one of the trails when I had to be out of the house for showings. I had recently purchased a small point and shoot camera and started trying to identify the birds and butterflies I saw. It was the owls that first captured me - I kept seeing them. I was amazed at how they could sit so still in the trees that most people walking by on the trail didn’t even notice.

(Picture from 2013, the first owl I photographed with that point and shoot camera.)

I’ve come to think of Labor Day as the end of the cycle and the new beginning of the year. When humans start to disappear and birds start to reappear making their migration south. Migrating flocks of birds in the fall follow a familiar path and yet each year is new, filled with juvenile birds making their first migration. Each day is full of possibility and you never know what might appear.

This year’s first surprise was an adult laughing gull. Laughing gulls are an eastern bird and I’ve only seen one before at this lake (a juvenile, who didn’t have the beautiful coloring of this adult). To be honest I didn’t even know for sure that it was a laughing gull until I consulted with my expert friend a few days later. I did know that this bird was migrating alone, stopping at an unfamiliar place on a new path. I watched as he stayed near but just far enough away from the small flock of ring-billed gulls. Birds are pretty good at social distancing.

Who knows what else this year will bring? I venture out now with my mask and hand sanitizer and certain locations I might have chosen in the past are too filled with humans thanks to the pandemic. Nevertheless, the birds are coming. Shorebirds, winter ducks, gulls, raptor migration - all part of the next season here.

This is life, in the real world. Thanks for joining me.