You’re not getting older, you’re getting better. Oh, wait—you ARE getting older!

Birding may keep us "young," but not literally.

(Listen to the radio version here.)

If you’ve gotta get a bilateral mastectomy, having your three-year-old grandson bring you a forklift because he heard you’re going to have trouble lifting things (and he came up with the idea all by himself!) apparently really does speed up the healing process.

Back in 1980 when I was teaching junior high math, my students were learning about prime numbers right when my 29^th birthday came around, so of course I told them that I was now officially in my prime. I’ve used that lame joke a lot over the years, most recently in 2022 when I turned 71. Now, next month when I turn 73, well, I’ll be back in my prime once again.

The concept of prime numbers will elude my grandson Walter for a few years more, but he’s very interested in people’s ages and knows that every day, everybody gets one day older. Before his August birthday, he told his parents that he did not want to turn four—“Three and a half is the best age because you can't get old and die while you’re three and a half.” He told me that when he grows up, he wants to be a veterinarian, a doctor, a construction worker, and a grocery store clerk. He said that on the days he’s a doctor, he wants to figure out how to make old people's ears work better so I can hear every kind of bird again. He said that won’t happen till he's a grownup, when I will be very, very, VERY old, but that's okay because I MUST still be alive.

I’ve never been proactive about getting old, at least not like Russ’s parents. When Russ and I were still dating, while his parents were in their fifties and his dad was still working, they were already members of AARP. My father-in-law retired when he was 62; when I was 62, I was just getting started with the most active decade of my professional life with nary a moment’s thought about slowing down, much less retiring. I’d never made it to a foreign country except Canada until I was in my fifties, and I did the vast majority of my long-distance travel in my sixties—to Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Uganda. I turned 62 in 2013, the year I did my Big Year, camping alone in remote areas here and there as I crisscrossed the Lower-48 seeing 604 species in the wild, 595 of them “ABA Countable.”

This is Water Canyon, in New Mexico, where I camped with the windows and hatchback open because a Flammulated Owl was calling all night long!

I turned 68 in 2019, one of the most busy, exciting, and rewarding years of my entire career, with speaking gigs at the Ocean State Bird Club in Rhode Island; the Indiana Dunes Birding Festival; the Acadia Birding Festival in Maine, the Maine Audubon/LL Bean Birding Festival (discontinued now); the Southeast Arizona Birding Festival; and the Brookline Bird Club and Hampshire Bird Club, both in Massachusetts. Each trip came with lots of wonderful birding.

Russ came with me to Massachusetts where I finally got to meet, in person, Deb Burns, editor of the four books I did for Storey Publishing including the one I was working on at the time, The Love Lives of Birds.

That year Russ also came with me to California to see the Peace, Love, and Woodstock exhibit at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa. We had to see that in person because the exhibit included my own 1996 letter to Charles Schulz and his response to me.

As long as we were in California, we took one of Debi Shearwater’s wonderful pelagic trips and drove down the coast so Russ could finally get up-close-and-personal views of a California Condor. We’d seen our first on my 60^th birthday (11/11/11!) in the Grand Canyon, but those were very high up in the air. This time around we saw just one, but boy was she (“Kodema,” #646) cooperative!

Earlier that same year, Russ and I made a trip to Florida where I got some of the best photos and sound recordings I’ve ever made there.

As I was taking photos of this Mangrove Cuckoo, Russ was holding up my phone to get a great, albeit short, recording of the same bird!

And that summer of 2019, we went to Chicago for our 50^th high school reunion.

If that wasn’t enough travel for a single year, 2019 was the year I went with my dear friend Susan Eaton on a birding trip to Panama. We stayed at three amazing “Canopy Family” destinations: the Canopy Tower…

… Canopy Lodge…

… and Canopy Camp.

This isn’t much of a photo, but this Harpy Eagle fledgling in a driving rainstorm is the only one I’ve ever seen.

All three were even more splendid than I’d anticipated, and I tend to anticipate a lot of impossibly wonderful things.

Yep—2019, the year I turned 68, was a darned good year. I closed it out with cataract surgery, but that made my long-distance vision clearer and brighter than it ever was when I was young.

I played with Photoshop to show what a difference cataract surgery made. The photo on the right is the original, which is how it looked after my first eye was repaired, through that eye. I played with Photoshop during the two weeks between the two surgeries to show how dingy it looked through my unrepaired eye.

At the end of 2019, I’d already had my first heart attack and first bout with breast cancer, but they hadn’t slowed me down. Five years later, it’s sobering to remember that my father, brother, sister, grandmother, and godfather never made it to 68, and as sweet little Walter reminds me, I really am old.

Does birding keep us young? Not literally, of course—my birth certificate still says I was born on November 11, 1951. Since that wonderful 2019, I’ve had a second heart attack and bout with breast cancer, a scary episode of vertigo, and two bouts of Covid. But just as in all the previous decades, the two things in my life that have kept me happy and engaged through the pandemic and aftermath have been my family and birding. In the past 2 years, Russ and I have been to Alaska and Hawaii, I brought my ABA Continental List to over 700, and now I am putting together a bunch of plans for next year, when I’ll celebrate my 50th anniversary of birding. I may be getting older, but as Walter reminds me, so is every four year old.

One of my plans for next year is a February trip to Cuba—I hope to see another Cuban Tody. Then Russ and I are hoping to do a “Tody Sweep”—seeing all four other species of todies, which will involve trips to Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.