Always Something to See

We had expected it to be raining this morning and thought that the bird-watching tour at Fort Macon by Ranger Randy would thus be cancelled.  But although it was cloudy, it was not raining, so we drove the short distance to the Fort and found Randy and four others ready to go on the tour.  It  was sprinkling a little by then, nothing very hard, so we started down the Elliot Coues Nature Trail behind the Fort in rain gear, carrying binoculars.  I could not hear any birds at all and did not expect to see many.

Randy is an enthusiastic bird-watcher who never grows tired of spotting birds.  He seems to be equipped with some kind of bird radar, spotting them long before the rest of us.  "Yellow rump there!" he would cry out and point, and the rest of us would swing our binoculars around to see.

Almost immediately, we saw a beautiful black-crested night heron that I would very likely not have spotted without the guidance of his keen eyes, sitting on a bare branch across a small pond, still and quiet, before leaping into the air and soaring away over the Coast Guard Station.  It reminded me of a poem I wrote last year:

Do we have a name for

The joy that we feel when the shroud of fog rolls away,

Or when the night heron rises in exultant flight? 

I tried to take photos of the heron and the other birds we saw, but had no success at all.  But I made a little list:

• Black-crested night heron
• Yellow rump warbler
• Song sparrow
• Common loon
• Red-throated loon
• Cormorant
• Bonaparte gull
• Red breasted merganser
• Sanderling
• Sand piper
• Willet 

 We went down to the beach (for the cormorants, loons, etc.) and circled back to the fort.  "Well, we saw some pretty good birds after all," I said.  "There's always something to see," Randy said.  And that is so true!

We felt like celebrating a little, so we stopped at the Shuckin Shack in Morehead City for lunch.  The cause for celebration is that exactly 41 years ago, Martha and I went out on our first date.  We talked about that over lunch - how our lives would have been different if we had not met, how many adventures we had shared together in the past and are planning for the future ("There's always something to see!"), and how wonderful it is to have a partner for life to love and cherish.  As Pastor Sarah had said in church yesterday, "Two are better than one." (Ecclesiastes 4:9).

It was Martha's turn to write on the white board on the refrigerator yesterday, and she wrote, "The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.  Here’s to 41 years!"