Tom's Life Bits

On a recent trip, the guy sitting across the table from me asked, “What's your favorite sport?”

When I said, “Bird-watching,” he said, “Say again?”

I tried to educate him on bird-watching.

First, bird-watching is the ultimate spectator sport, requiring no skills, no equipment other than one's eyes, and no admission fees or cable TV assessments.

Oh, you can invest in a pair of binoculars if you like. And if you're courting the eastern bluebird, you would do well to buy a can of mealworms, which to them is caviar.

Bird-watching is a humanitarian sport. You're cultivating a relationship with nature and helping one of God's species survive in tough times.

A few decades ago, the bluebird was almost extinct, primarily because, in North Carolina especially, they were being sucked into the flues of tobacco-curing barns. A concerted campaign throughout the South to erect bluebird boxes on fence posts, along golf course, and in residential backyards is responsible for their comeback.

Before the storm

Contrary to what you may think, bird-watching can be exciting.

On the eve of last week's Big Storm, on instruction from friends Jack and Trina Baumer at Wild Birds Unlimited, I taped over the ventilation holes in the bird boxes where the birds would be overnighting during the bitter cold. I also filled the seed feeders and put up two fresh cakes of red pepper suet.

The birds instinctively knew of the approaching storm. All day Friday, they descended in droves, like shoppers at a midnight madness sale.

“Come look!” my wife called from the den. “The yard is full of red-winged blackbirds!” I had not seen a red-winged blackbird in decades.

The red-winged blackbird has a literary and historical background. Remember the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence”:

The maid was in the garden

Hanging out the clothes.

Along came a blackbird

And snapt off her nose.

The rhyme, dating to the 1700s, was apparently used by pirates, including the notorious Blackbeard, as a coded message to recruit young men to service on their vessels for six pence a day.

Peace at home

Of primary social significance is the fact that the divorce rate among bird-watchers is said to be astoundingly low.

How many times have you heard a divorce court lawyer arguing, “Your Honor, my client was denied the spousal companionship to which she is entitled because her husband spent his leisure hours staring through binoculars at red-bellied sapsuckers and confusing fall warblers?”

Bird-watching is morally responsible. And it's far less risky than the increasingly popular sport of rampant womanizing, especially among politicians. John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford, to mention a few, would undoubtedly attest to that. ac.snow@newsobserver.com or 919-836-5636