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April weekends always promise but only sometimes deliver. However, a weekend where you can celebrate Easter, Passover, the beginning of migration, or just an excuse to stop sheltering in place for a few hours is bound to be a good time! I’ve been impatient about the arrival of spring, but a long walk revealed shoots, blooms, and buds everywhere, along with my FOY Hermit Thrush.
Author: Andres Lares, Shapiro Negotiations Institute There is a small truism about connecting with people that anyone in sales can tell you, and they learned it early in their careers. When speaking to somebody on the phone, they can hear the difference when you smile. It’s true. And it demonstrates a tried and true concept that is more critical now than ever before: It’s not just what you say, but how you say it. .
In Costa Rica, official, enforced quarantine hasn’t happened yet. At the moment, thanks to the government getting serious about this darn thing earlier rather than later, the number of new cases per day in Costa Rica has been very much linear in nature. Thankfully, as of yet, it seems like enough people have stayed home and were careful about social distancing and hand washing to prevent an exponential increase in this awful form of illness.
After being home for just over a month, I’ve been doing two things to keep my birding sanity. Firstly, I’ve been birding the heck out of our backyard, and encouraging people to do the same (both here and elsewhere ). Secondly, I’ve been recounting certain special birding moments – one of which I will share here. A single morning birding the thorny desert of Baringo in Kenya’s Rift Valley yielded several species at a rate I at times struggled to keep up with.
As I mentioned last week, social distancing is widespread but still voluntary here in Mexico, so there are no limitations on being able to get out and enjoy nature. Still, with my being 61 years old and mildly asthmatic, I want to make sure I keep my distance from other people. This has determined which places I visit, and which I avoid. Most of my favorite sites are lonely anyway, so this has not been a great problem.
Traveling to Delhi for work last spring, I was not very optimistic about birding there. Still, I contacted a local guide and shot for the moon: “Can you show me any owls”? Much to my surprise, he could, all within an hour`s drive of my hotel in Delhi (which after all is a contender for the most populous city in the world, similar to Shanghai, where I live).
As someone who has recorded over 80 episodes and counting on the Tests and the Rest podcast, I’ve learned that hosting interesting guests can be really enjoyable. Thanks to Ed Pullen, I now know how much fun being a guest can be, especially when speaking with a curious, engaging host: On Episode #56 I talk with Mike Bergin, originator and force behind 10,000 Birds, the biggest birding blog on the internet, and a birder who travels extensively to some of the best birding sites on earth.
As someone who has recorded over 80 episodes and counting on the Tests and the Rest podcast, I’ve learned that hosting interesting guests can be really enjoyable. Thanks to Ed Pullen, I now know how much fun being a guest can be, especially when speaking with a curious, engaging host: On Episode #56 I talk with Mike Bergin, originator and force behind 10,000 Birds, the biggest birding blog on the internet, and a birder who travels extensively to some of the best birding sites on earth.
I can’t imagine what life must be like during the current viral pandemic for those unlucky souls who don’t bird. Certainly, all this isolation and disorientation is strange enough for birders, too, but at least we can but at least we can depend on the comforting patterns of the natural world — especially now that spring migration is really picking up — to provide some sense of temporal order in an existence now otherwise devoid of usual patterns and routines.
I mentioned last week that we have to stay on our property for 14 days. We cannot go anywhere. We were not too concerned about having to stay at home, because we have plenty of things that we can do and there is always plenty to observe. The water we provide in our garden attracts many birds including the Double-barred Finch in the header photo. Our garden is mostly native plants, which attract both birds and insects.
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