Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

I made it home from Ecuador late on December 21. When I got up in the morning, the first bird I saw out the dining room window was a Pileated Woodpecker. Not BB, but the unbanded other male who visits regularly. A female showed up a couple of times—I call her “She-B,” but the timing of her arrivals seems coordinated with that non-banded male, not BB. Fortunately, BB himself showed up in mid-afternoon. Chickadees, my pairs of Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Blue Jays, and White-breasted Nuthatches, and a small group of juncos were here on and off, all day. I took enormous pleasure in these homey birds as I unpacked and did laundry.

I am very much a homebody. During the worst of the pandemic, when I couldn’t go anywhere at all, I didn’t feel stuck even when I couldn’t leave home for a full year—I was taking too much pleasure photographing and making sound recordings of my backyard birds and just sitting around enjoying them. That was when my pregnant daughter and son-in-law came here to live for the duration, adding to my homebody pleasures. The only personal sorrow I suffered during the pandemic was because my older son Joe was so very far away, in Florida. So as things progressed and we could finally travel, the very first trip Russ and I made, in October 2021, was to visit him. We of course spent one day birding, and I was thrilled that it was Joe who spotted my very first American Flamingo within the United States. I suppose it’s a little weird for a homebody to enjoy traveling as much as I do, but as long as I get break time between trips, I love it. I get a huge amount of pleasure preparing for a trip—studying all the possible birds I might see, learning about the country, and things like that. I’d say that I get a good 5 percent of all the joy from travel preparing ahead of time.

The birding trips I’ve taken have always been wonderful, filling my mind, heart, and imagination with incredible new experiences and so very many birds—I enjoy species I’ve already seen as well as new ones. But all that travel is exhausting and intense. I’m sort of a Mr. Rogers kind of person—I like to take my time and process things slowly, but I couldn’t indulge my natural pokiness when visiting hummingbird feeding stations in Ecuador, where a dozen different species might be zipping in and out at the same time and I of course wanted to photograph every one of them. It was incredibly beautiful and joyful, but so overwhelming that every night as I settled into bed, every time I closed my eyes I was seeing colorful flashes darting here and there and suddenly realized my brain was replaying at high speed all those hummingbirds flying about.

Every spot we went to was different and exciting—the reason Ecuador has 1,700 bird species while being the size of Nevada or Colorado is that the unique topography has isolated so many populations that, over time, because different species. And Edy Goodyear of Sword Billed Expeditions plotted out our trip so we’d visit entirely different spots, which is why I saw at least one lifer every single day we spent birding together–many days I saw a dozen or more new birds. Keeping them and all the birds I’d already seen straight in my mind was fun but mentally exhausting. And being way up in the Andes looking at and photographing that glorious condor was extremely taxing physically as well, plus my footing was unsteady due both to the high altitude and uneven terrain.

I don’t think I’ve ever in my life been as sleep deprived as I was when I got home on Sunday night after our long travel delay. I’d been up since very early Saturday morning, and could only take brief catnaps at the airports and on the planes. I fell asleep quickly, but even through Monday was pretty dazed. But yep—I was swelling with joy to be back home with Russ and my chickadees and Pileated Woodpeckers. And now I could actually start looking at the photos I’d taken.

There are just too many to rush through, and it’s going to take weeks to process them all. But somehow, the pleasure in seeing the ones that turned out well is even more intense than the pleasure in the split second that I took each photo in the moment. The hummingbirds in my photos stay put so I can savor them; the brilliant tanagers aren’t about to flit behind vegetation; the condor isn’t about to disappear over the horizon.

No matter how fantastic every other element of a trip is, it’s the birds that define it, both in the moment and in my memory. And my lovely memories are triggered over and over as I work through those photos. Oddly enough, many of the memories are even more vivid looking back than they were in the moment, when I was in such a distracted daze with so many different things pulling my attention in every direction. My inner Mr. Rogers loves being able to savor one joy at a time. And now I can enjoy each one of these tropical memories even as my beloved chickadees flit in and out of my window feeder, just a couple of feet from my computer.

So yes, of all the pleasures I take in a trip, 5 percent of it is ahead of time, and I’d say about 45 percent happens during the trip. That leaves a full 50 percent of the joy of travel to be savored over the rest of my life. For me, travel is a gift that truly keeps on giving.