Bird watching

Veronica: "Have you ever seen a nuthatch?" Archie: "No, I wasn't around when Jughead was born!"

I grew up in Sackville, near the southeast corner of New Brunswick.  That area is close to a lot of bird migratory routes, so it's a good place for bird watching.  The local university has had a bird watcher's club.

Birding doesn't interest me so much.  I remember one spring when four robins appeared on our lawn and my mother called them Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, after the recent sex comedy movie.  And there was a time when I identified a bird on our lawn as a flicker, from an illustrated guide. (Flickers are cousins of woodpeckers.) And there were a lot of seagulls around our cottage near Northumberland Strait.

There was also the time when we had some pheasants in our back yard. (In our garden we'd grown some corn in cobs too small for us to eat, so we left it out for them.) The male pheasant has fancier feathers than the female, which always seemed odd to me.  Shouldn't the females be the fancy-looking ones?

Did you know that Ian Fleming got the name James Bond from the author of a guide to Caribbean bird watching?