My wife got me birds of Europe last year because I once mentioned it’s a neat book (my parents have it). Next thing I know I buy some binoculars for birdwatching and started tracking the birds that visit my garden. It’s not a spectacular list but I am proud of it because I used the book to identify the birds and got it confirmed with birdnet. The list: house sparrow, blackbird, goldfinch, swift, common house martin, common linnet, greenfinch and blue tits. Edit: and wood doves

This is me.

I love watching the crested pigeons and turtle doves, and trying to understand their culture.

This made me laugh. I’m in my early 40s and in the past six months I’ve been using the Merlin app to identify birds by their song. It’s really fun to see what’s going on around me in terms of birds. I had no interest before.

My cousin at 31 years old said this weekend, “I know I’m getting old because I was sitting on a swing at a friends and thought to myself ‘This would be a great spot to watch birds from’.”

I love how birds are named. Look Debbie, it’s a Coloredpart Sounditmakes.

Look, Raymond. A yellow crested warbler.

That’s because at some point in your life you realise that birds are just tiny dinosaurs.

Birds are super cute, but younger people are often too focused on themselves to even see how cool they are. :)

Except of course if they can get Instagram likes for the pictures of birds, then it’s interesting… :p

Yes I’m stereotyping here… I’m aware.

Plane watching is basically birdwatching for nerds.

I dunno why, but I’ve always been fascinated by the twitchy, blank-eyed movements they make. Also, there are some fantastic high def videos of birds that my kiddo’s cat loves to watch with me.

Relatable. Birds are suddenly really interesting in your 30s.

I like to watch them how they build their nest.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=v3ps-CcJJlo

“Look Raymond, a yellow crested warbler”

Very relatable. I started leaving food for some local magpies about a year ago, and now they wake me up every morning at 6.

I once had a problem when suddenly some tits arrived and started stealing all the food. A huge magpie would take like one hazelnut and be on its way, while these small fuckers would eat like pigs, and then hide what was left. They’d take the nuts and shove them somewhere between the flowers on my balcony. Tough the magpies too have often burried nuts in the soil below the flowers, only to dig them out again.

And it was so cool to watch some sparrow coming and going a dozen times to pull out some weeds that have been growing (I left the pots with the flowers outside over winter, the flowers died and weeds started to grow), and then carry them to a hole in a wall where a brick is missing which presumably is the nest.

But it was so so cool when I got woken up a few days in succession to a silhouette of a majestic crow standing on my balcony (my bed looks directly through the balcony window facing north-east). Crows are so cool, and magpies are really beatutiful, though extremely skittish.