The Pokémon franchise has turned 30, which means that it’s been a long time since a childhood friend and I braved Pokémon Blue’s haunted Lavender Town together – solemnly handing the Game Boy back and forth in the first (and perhaps last) documented case of two only children sharing something.
For most of my 29 years, I couldn’t have cared less about birdwatching. But as it turns out, this hobby is uniquely suited to those of us who belong to the Pokémon generation.
It started with trying to impress a woman. We were on a date and she gave me homework: go watch a birdwatching documentary called Listers. It was due on our next date.
This was easy for me; I once read an 800-page book because a crush mentioned it precisely once. When I ever-so-casually dropped that I’d read it, my crush revealed she had not. She only knew of it, she explained, because it was her crush’s favourite book. Watching a doco was a comparatively small commitment in the pursuit of love everlasting.
Little did I know that, like a cockatoo on sunflower seeds, I would soon be hooked and screeching for more.
Just like the fictional Pokémon trainer, the birdwatcher finds themself gradually going farther afield in pursuit of new critters. You get sidetracked on hikes and holidays. You drag family and friends into gulches and gullies. You start getting excited about bird poo.
On one memorable occasion, my mum and I came across the kind of nitrogen-rich bonanza that the drafters of the Guano Islands Act could only dream of. Above the muck, we spotted a group of roosting nankeen night herons. We were delighted at discovering them and they seemed unbothered at being discovered (despite their frankly embarrassing living situation).
Listers take birding to the next level. They’re the ones carrying telescopic lenses that resemble Ottoman hand cannons and binoculars whose price tags make your vision blur. They will stop at nothing – there is no grass too tall, no bug bite too infected. They will cover themselves in twigs and lie in swamps, providing feasts that ticks will recall fondly for generations. I am in awe of them.
Such dedicated birders can identify hundreds of birdcalls … I know maybe four. Yet even this can prove useful. The next time your partner says, “What the hell was that sound at 5am this morning?” you can helpfully respond: “That was an eastern koel. It gets its name from its distinctive call: Ko-el! Ko-el! Ko-el!” If you do this loudly enough, they will forget all about being annoyed with the bird.
Because birds are just about everywhere, birdwatching dovetails neatly with other hobbies. Once while surfing (yes, another hobby taken up to impress a woman), my friends and I watched a bird twirl around us and then dive into the waves with a survival-of-the-fittest finesse that would even make Tom Daley throw in the towel.
Back on shore, I Googled furiously. I knew it was some kind of tern and thought smugly that perhaps I was getting the hang of this thing. Not so fast. There are crested terns, lesser crested terns, Caspian terns, little terns, common terns and white-fronted terns – and all of them enjoy New South Wales fish for brunch. To ID this bird, I needed help.
Fortunately, app-loads of twitchers stand ready. They come in two distinct breeds: (1) The impassioned: “Wonderful shot of an even more wonderful bird, looks like a little tawny frogmouth family. Lucky you!”, and (2) The impassive: “Tawny frogmouth. One adult with juvenile. – Steve.”
Birding also facilitates real-world connections. A few weeks ago on the NSW south coast, I asked a middle-aged couple: “Shag or something else?” The woman didn’t miss a beat: “Shag sounds nice, but what’s the something else?”
There is a temptation in birdwatching to “list” as many birds as possible, to catch ’em all. But the deeper joy comes from the same place that it did in Pokémon: falling inexplicably in love with a creature that isn’t the rarest, biggest, fastest or most beautiful. Pikachu is a dime a dozen, but Ash Ketchum would take a thunderbolt to the face for that little yellow rat.
Every Pokémon player has experienced that fierce loyalty to one pocket monster or another. The same is true in birdwatching. Why do I love crested doves so much? Maybe because they look like nervous tween punks who’ve stolen Dad’s hair gel to go hang with the older kids. They’re certainly not rare. I see them every time I walk to the station and I used to not give a flying hoot.
I like birdwatching, I suppose, because it reminds me that it’s easy to walk past something remarkable even when you’re looking for it, and especially when you’re not. Now hand me those binos.
Source: Read Full Article