paging harper lee

This morning, I woke up on time without trouble (not a normal occurence, and a pleasant change), and could have made the early bus to get into work especially early, but realized that I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I did that, so I took my time and read the comics and ate a muffin before heading out for the regular bus, and of course missed it by seconds, and was pretty unhappy.

Then I decided, despite the 12-degree weather, that I’d just hoof it in rather than stand around and wait for the next (more crowded) bus (which would get me to work late anyway). Crankily I embarked, trudging down sidewalks and slipping across intersections, until my morning’s epiphanic moment: the sight, as I rounded a corner, of a mockingbird in a bush a foot or two from me!

As it wasn’t me who she was mocking — at least to my knowledge it wasn’t — this was exciting to me (I kind of felt ripe for mocking at this point, after my morning foibles, but I generally know when I’m being mocked, I think). Birdwatching¹ opportunities are somewhat less common in the city than where I used to live, but still present — it’s perhaps more exciting to see a relatively uncommon bird when you’re in the city and aren’t used to it. But there are certain birds that I’ve only seen in the city, since moving back. The mockingbird is one, the nighthawk is another.

Besides the turkeys that hang out outside the business school (I kid you not; I saw one puffing himself up in front of a mirrorlike pane of glass the other day, vain creature), these are about the only variations on the normal concrete-and-glass-and-sparrow-and-pigeon landscape we have. This spring/summer I vow to get out to some more wooded places and do some real birdwatching. In the meantime, I’ll let the occasional appearance of a mockingbird make my day.

1. The term “birdwatching” has, I fear, fallen out of vogue in favor of the presumably less passive “birding.” “Birding,” however, strikes me as a verb that ought to be transitive; I think of appropriate usage as being along the lines of, say, “Those cats were crampin’ our style, so we totally birded them and split!” Thus, when talking about actually looking for and identifying birds, I tend to stick with “birdwatching.”