Zebras in the closet

Some people are obsessed with baseball or a certain celebrity or quilting or antiques or what have you, my tastes run more in the direction of kittiwakes and avocets, especially this time a year, perhaps it is a type of 'bird flu?'  Some people collect teaspoons or stamps, I get to put a little tiny check mark next to yet another name on a list composed of such entries as 'bristle thighed curlew' and 'chuck-will's-widow.'  I am an avid bird watcher, but not an obsessed one (I won't spend thousands of dollars to go on a guided tour of some exotic location in search of more unique species for my 'life list').  And with our recent move, I have discovered that I have outgrown my beloved and dogeared Peterson's 'Eastern Birds' (the original birder's bible, at least in eastern North America) but a whole world of new and interesting species has opened up to me.  What I did not expect was to find certain 'life birds' here that I've been trying to see for years further north and east.

Yesterday I saw a red crossbill (a big red finchy thing with a cool beak) at a neighbor's bird feeder.  They are considered a 'northern finch' and should be easier to find, say near the Canadian border where we used to live, but never did I ever see one, despite all hope and effort on my part, and here a whole flock is busy in someone's backyard while I am on a totally unrelated errand.  It was a thrilling moment, in finding something I had sought for so long, but also a bit anticlimactic, finding something so long sought in so common a place when I was not even looking for it!  It was exactly like seeing my first showy lady's slipper in a road ditch (a big, colorful orchid native to northern swamps).  I suppose it is a good metaphor for life: we strive and hope and seek and long for something, yet all our effort comes to naught, and then when we least expect it, after we have despaired of ever finding it, we turn around and there it is, in a place and time we never thought to look.  Life should never lose its sense of adventure, its sparkle of the unknown, for truly, you never know what may be lurking just around the bend, over the next rise, or on the day after tomorrow.