Sorry it’s taken me this long to blog about my first bird of the year, but I’ve managed to get a sinus infection for the first time in years and the worst migraine I’ve had in years. This is also my first winter in cold weather in years. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Apparently I’ve become acclimated to the tropics. My younger self raised in Northern Indiana would call me a weather wimp.
Of course, maybe I angered the gods of wine and frolic with my last blog, because after saying I didn’t want to drink or party, I spent the rest of New Year’s Eve with a migraine. So, ironically without drinking a drop of alcohol I got the headache, nausea, and the next day had a migraine hangover. Probably worse than many of you that had a much more raucous party night.
New Year’s Eve will probably never be my favorite holiday, but I promise to keep the spirit of the evening in my heart and mind year round if I just never have another migraine. So in the spirit of this time of year I will make New Year’s resolutions, but first, the bird of 2019 for me.
When I finally woke on New Year’s Day 2019, which was close to noon I was feeling so rough I almost forgot it was the first day of the year. What was my first bird of the year? European Starling. Yep, a Starling. The pests that had just found our bird feeders and emptied them, and have emptied them faster than we can fill them ever since January 1. Did you know that all the Starlings in this country descend from two hundred birds released on the east coast? A Shakespeare society released the birds, because they thought it would be a good idea to have every bird mentioned in Shakespeare in America. My understanding is that they had to release Starlings more than once for them to survive. If I could go back in time I’d tell them the damage the birds have done to our native cavity nesting birds like the bluebird.
According to birder tradition, Starling will be my theme of the year. My bird of the year in 2018 was dove, matters of the heart, romance, Goddess, and certainly that was a theme for last year. I’ll blog more about that at some point, but let’s just say that I’ll take a year of the Starling over another year of the dove. Starling can mean communication, group issues, or maybe I need to reread Shakespeare? I’ll be mediating on the bird to figure out what lessons I’m supposed to learn from it. Oddly, the first animal I saw this year other than our house pets was a neighbor’s Australian Shepard. I did have a couple of years where squirrel was my message of the year, and the year that we got our first rescue cats it was a cat staring at me on our front stoop. So Starling and Australian Shepard, maybe? I’ll look up the history of the breed and see if there’s any cross over between them and Starling. Or maybe it’s my year of the Aussie? 🙂
Okay, in the spirit of truly celebrating New Year’s Eve here are my resolutions:
- Walk and socialize the dogs more.
- Add more cardio in the gym.
- Add two more training sessions of FMA (Filipino Martial Arts) per week, to the two I’m already doing.
- Use my new training gloves so much that they need replaced by next January 1.
- See and socialize with my friends more often.
- One vacation trip to somewhere I’ve never been.
- More gun range time per month.