The Mourning Dove and other winged friends

When you are retired it is important to have some hobbies.  You can't just sit around the house all day in the recliner with a beverage in one hand and the television remote in the other.  I mean you could, but I don't think that is a very good idea.

Now that I have the knee and hip replacement surgeries behind me, which have allowed me to be more mobile, I just feel better, which is a very good thing, especially for your mental well-being.

So I have developed some hobbies which are not so much physically active, but certainly have kept me mentally active.  I seriously follow the Cardinals and Blues, which has been both good and bad, and along with that I participate in several rotisserie baseball and hockey leagues.  Like several of my ancestors who have passed, I have a sincere interest in genealogy.  I like knowing who I am and where I came from.  My ancestry DNA shows I'm 76 percent from the UK, but I do have some French, German and Danish blood in me as well.  Go figure.  

I also like to cook.  M is a much, much better cook than I am, but she says I am more of a chef than she is.  She says that because I don't measure and the dishes I make are generally just made up on the fly.  The garden is a hobby as is following Flight Radar 24.  As my friends Justin Pannell and Josh Donnan would say, it's relaxing to be focused on MEM shortly after midnight and watch the FedEx planes come in.

Those are all hobbies that I've had more than a passing interest in over the years, but I have one hobby that is relatively new.  It actually grabbed my attention about 13 months ago.

Last April M and I were at her sister Paula and her husband Mike's cabin in Mountain View, Arkansas to watch the total solar eclipse, which by the way was spectacular.  Their home is at the end of a dirt road, off a dirt road.  You don't get there by accident.  Anyway, one morning, Mike and I were sitting on the front porch talking, drinking our coffee, and he showed me an app on his phone called Merlin, which was created by the Orinthology Department at Cornell University.  After installing it, you activate and at your leisure hit "Sound ID", and it listens for birds in the area you are occupying.  I like birds, my dad was a bird watcher, so I installed it.  Once on, sitting there on top of a ridge in Stone County, Arkansas, the first bird it identified was a Mourning Dove.  It quickly identified several other birds whose songs we could hear.  I was hooked.

Since the app is on my phone, I've "bird-listened" in Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida.  In the 13 months since I first registered the mourning dove, I have heard 81 different species of birds!  I mean 81!  I'm not sure a year ago I could have named 81 different species.

When we were on Hilton Head Island last month I heard herons and egrets, birds not normally heard in and around Tuscumbia.  One day while we were on the island, I drove alone to the Hilton Head Forest Preserve and then to Pinckney Island with the express intent of listening to birds!   Seriously, can you believe that.  One morning last fall we were at Jonathan and Lea Snell's and I heard and saw an osprey.  I was almost as excited about that as I was Lea's shrimp and grits.

One day last week, a day it wasn't raining, I was on our back deck with my coffee and my phone.  It was about 7.30 in the morning or so and the birds were singing, so I turned Merlin on.  When I went inside about an hour and a half later, Merlin had identified 20 different species, including two I hadn't heard before, the eastern meadowlark and the rose-breasted grosbeak!  I am not exaggerating too much when I say that excited me more than the Cardinals sweeping the Mets in a doubleheader.

Sure, there are some birds easy to identify, the mourning dove with its distinctive "cooing" sound, the crow or blue jay, or the hooting of an owl.  I never thought in my wildest dreams I could instantly identify a northern cardinal, or a Carolina wren, or tufted titmouse by their sound.  But I can now.

In case you are wondering, Merlin has over 1,300 birds in their data base, so I have a lot of listening to do.  So I'll be on the back deck a lot, just listening to the birds, hoping for something new.  If you're in the neighborhood stop by, I'm sure I'll have some coffee ready, and we can enjoy God's gift of birds together.

Have a wonderful Monday and be nice to each other.