Two-fisted bird watchers are for real. Yeah, you. You’re part of a group that gets out into the world. You go where the wild goose goes, as the cowboy song says.

Today we heard from a guy who visits this site from time to time. He’s exploring Asia. He found an internet hookup outside Shanghai and sent a message. I pictured him in that faraway place looking at people, birds, maybe some shaggy Bactrian camels, and clouds in a Chinese sky.

(I notice clouds when I travel. On a St. Petersburg park bench where I’d been watching Hooded Crows I leaned back, looked up and said to my wife: Just think, those are Russian clouds. She looked at me funny. Nothing new in that).

Last year we emailed a guy to tell him he won a sweatshirt. He lived in Alaska, which in itself is a two-fisted thing to do. Then he wrote back saying that he was leaving next morning for a months-long research expedition to study birds in the steamy wilds of Borneo. He figured the sweatshirt would be useful when he came home.

We heard from a woman who rehabs raptors, owls, vultures. She’s the owner of a handful of scars and the author of a pretty good book. We’ve heard from guys who explore Amazon jungles and find new species. One guy wrote us about Magellan Penguins that he saw when visiting Puerto Madryn in Patagonia.

We hear from swamp explorers in southern bayous, desert hikers in Arizona, mountain climbers, beach combers and science geeks who spend way more time in the wild than they do in a lab, ala Indiana Jones.

The two-fisted birdwatcher is no fictional figure; no wannabe. He or she is out there, getting bug-bit and windblown, seeing birds and other wild things and knowing their names. Hey, that’s you.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2010 at 1:39 pm and is filed under "Daily Sightings" A Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.