Dear Magical Diary: Post Seventeen

     Dear Magical Diary,

Note: As part of my "Charm School" project with Cara Mia of Cutewitch772 this summer, I have decided to keep a daily and public magical diary.  In what we're calling the Charm School Syllabus (a list of suggested tasks for someone seeking a first degree initiation published in Silver RavenWolf's book To Stir a Magick Cauldron), one task is "Provide a magickal diary to your instructor that encompasses one full year of your magickal experiences." Now, this task doesn't explicitly state that this diary needs daily entries, but I have decided to write daily as best I can.

Today I went birding, and that's all I want to talk about! I didn't do anything else super witchy-just checked in with Cara about my updates to Charm School work that I already shared here.

I joined a birding group at church to get more involved with the community and to learn more about local flora and fauna now that I live in northeast Ohio. I want to get grounded here - to know the indigenous history, to make friends, and to know the names of the plants and animals around me.

Today we went to Cleveland Lakefront Nature Reserve and walked along the birding trail. I saw old standbys that I have learned to identify from our usual “patch” at Acacia Reservation–red-winged blackbirds, robins, song sparrows, blue jays, cardinals, goldfinches, and so on. There was a great blue heron on the lake, along with some Canada geese and mallards. Birds that were new to me in person today were Baltimore orioles, yellow warblers, a cormorant, a willow flycatcher, a catbird, house wrens, and an indigo bunting. Indigo buntings are so brilliantly colored. It was stunning, but my bird of the day was the yellow warbler. I observed more of them, up closer and for longer, and they are darling. Or maybe I said my bird of the day was the Baltimore oriole.

I’m growing in my skills as a birder. I would say that my biggest gift as a birder is as a spotter - I am often the person who notices a bird first - a little movement in a tree, a rustling sound in a bush, and so on. For room for growth, I definitely need to practice using binoculars more - I either borrow a pair from the library or our leaders, so I don’t use them regularly and they are surprisingly tricky for me. I will see the bird with my eyes, but then I have a hard time finding it with my binoculars. I also want to get better at recognizing birdsong- I can reliably recognize a cardinal and a red-winged blackbird, but that’s about it. As far as identifying birds by sight, I am a pretty quick learner, but there are so many birds to learn here.

So far, I haven’t done much reading about birding, which is unusual for me. Usually when I develop an interest or start a hobby, I gobble up every word I can find about it. Aside from two or three books about how to attract birds to your backyard that I read in May, I haven’t done any reading about birding. I am trying to learn from my two teachers and from real life experience right now. I may do some reading in the winter when the birding group goes on hiatus and when I probably won’t spend much time out and about, but for now, I am focusing on learning by listening and learning by doing.

On today’s trip, I did bring along the field guide that my friend got me for my birthday. I am going to a witchcamp in July, and I am planning on going birding in the mornings. I am an inveterate early riser, which is an anomaly in the Pagan world in my experience, so I am planning on going for long walks in the morning before breakfast. I plan to bring my field guide and a notebook. I don’t think I will have binoculars - the library binoculars are all booked up until the week I return, and I don’t want to risk losing or damaging a pair from my birding friends - even a starter pair is worth a few hundred dollars. So I may not see a ton of birds, and I may not be able to identify them all, but I will do my best to try and I am going to try without the aid of any of my birding apps until the last day of camp.

Mike and I went grocery shopping when I got back from birding, and we watched The Hunger Games last night (he hadn't seen it), and then watched the other two movies this afternoon. It's fun to watch someone experience something for the first time.

Yours under the stars,

Stella

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