I'm up at the cabin for a few days but wanted to leave you with some bird humor.
You might be a birder if....
Someone yells "Duck!", and you look up and shout "Where?"
Every time you practice your bird calls thinking that you are alone, someone pops up from out of nowhere.
Vacations are planned to maximize the number of life birds.
You criticize television programs and commercials that depict a bald eagle but play a red-tailed hawk call.
People stop and stare when you pish at the shrubbery at the local mall.
Someone yells "Duck!", and you look up and shout "Where?"
Every time you practice your bird calls thinking that you are alone, someone pops up from out of nowhere.
Vacations are planned to maximize the number of life birds.
You criticize television programs and commercials that depict a bald eagle but play a red-tailed hawk call.
People stop and stare when you pish at the shrubbery at the local mall.
You might be a birder if you know the real name for shopping center pigeons.
Lunch breaks find you driving to check out your favorite hot spot.
You might be a birder if you want to see just one more warbler before lunch.
You might be a birder if you tell your friends you saw 78 birds today even though you saw 600.
Your spouse says, "It's either me or the birds," and you have to think about it.
On sunny days you hop in the car, crank up your tape of bird calls, and drive like crazy to the nearest mountain where the thermals are great for soaring hawks.
You pay a neighbor kid $20 to roll on a carcass and lay still while you search the sky for vultures.
Clouds take on the shape of birds, and you can distinguish male from female, and adult from immature plumage.
A machine squeaks at work and you describe it to maintenance as sounding like a black-and-white warbler.
The first time you meet your future in-laws you demonstrate the courtship dance of the woodcock, replete with sound effects.
You spend fifteen minutes preparing dinner for your family, and thirty minutes mixing and placing seed for your birds.
You wake up your spouse at 5:30am and exclaim, "Is that a phoebe I'm hearing outside the window?"
Preparing for trips to visit out-of-state relatives involves contacting local birders, securing local bird lists, and buying the appropriate Lane's Guide.
You identify calls of birds in the soundtracks of television shows and movies.
You're willing to fight with anyone who criticizes your optics.
You participate in hours-long discussions about the pros and cons of using a certain field guide.
You lose friends, and perhaps even your spouse, from fighting over the pronunciation of "pileated."
You spend most of the day on Saturday, after getting up at 4 a.m. making a five-hour drive, in near zero degree weather in snow and sleet with wet feet and inadequate clothing, looking for an unusual bird, and then exclaim "YES!" with a big grin on Monday morning when someone at work asks you if you had a good weekend.
You are the only one in the room who doesn't think "Prairie Chicken" and "Sapsucker" are funny.
You have trouble following movies, because whenever they have a scene with birdsong in the background, you try to ID all the songs and then lose track of the plot.
Answering "yes" to any of these questions qualifies you as a birder.
*The following birding humor is credited to the following site:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bbowman/birds/humor/index.html
