I have a confession

I like looking at the birds in my garden! There I've said it...... I'm out of the closet..... I am a bird watcher..... Eeuuw

No I can't be.... I'm just a person who likes watching birds in my garden.

I suppose I should confess the other thing whilst I'm being this honest - I own a bird book too.

I'm sure that this would amuse my ex-husband immensely. I am not, however, about to become obsessive about the birds in my garden or form some nepotistic, hierarchical group that transforms a simple pleasure into something far more political and unpleasant. Sorry Mark, although it's highly unlikely that you will be reading this.

When the birds are so abundant and colourful it's hard not to look at them and appreciate their beauty and then it goes one step further and I found I wanted to know what that beautiful stripey noisy thing was so I bought a book. Beautiful stripey thing was in fact a female Asian Koel which is a cuckoo and was doing a typical cuckoo thing of trying to lay her egg in the nest of something far smaller and not remotely similar.

Which brings me to an issue that has puzzled me for a long time. Birds apparently imprint; whatever they see when they first peep out of the egg is imprinted as being the parent and birds generally don't go for interspecies breeding unless they are a duck or goose, who have no such qualms. So, if a cuckoo hatches in the nest of a wren for example, it believes its mother is a wren, it probably also believes that it too is a wren, how on earth does it ever get together with another cuckoo to perpetuate the species if it believes it is another bird entirely? Unless of course the other cuckoo was also brought up by a wren and is displaying similar behaviour etc so it's like being members of the same club..... Ah! I think I get it now.

I digress. Alarmingly I realised that I actually remembered the names of some of the birds from the trip in 1996 with Mark, subliminal learning or what!

I have now counted 32 different species of birds that frequent our garden, which I think is pretty awesome and it doesn't include all the little brown jobs that lurk in the undergrowth or the things that make strange noises in the jungle at dusk.

In the mornings I take my cup of coffee and biscuits out to my favourite rock and sit and watch all the life going on around me. It makes my mind still and brings me into the present moment. Nature always does that to me. It makes me realise that at times my mind is like an over-excited puppy chasing after thoughts as though they were balls and those thoughts are usually are of things that have long since passed or not even happened yet. It's actually very difficult to be in the now, but I find that watching the birds in my garden does help me to achieve that state. After all, nature is in the now! The Bulbuls who amuse me so much with their comical cries are totally oblivious to all the man-made chaos that is plaguing the human world right now. They aren't worrying about what is going to happen tomorrow; they are only interested in the papaya I have just laid out for them, it doesn't matter to them that there may not be papaya tomorrow - they have it today and that's enough.

So as I'm sitting there on my rock trying to get the puppy and ball under control I ask myself "Do I have enough for right now?" "Am I happy right now?" because the only moment that truly exists is this moment sat on my rock. I can always answer yes to those questions so I take a deep breath and relax and know that everything is OK.

I heard a wonderful quote in a movie, the name of which I've forgotten, but the quote lingered in my mind "Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due" ~William Ralph Inge

Anyway, it's time to don my anorak and go back to the birds and the book.