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I have a New Year’s Day tradition. It comes from being a birder for years, and being Wiccan. The idea is that the first bird you see on New Year’s Day is your bird for the year. It will be a sign for the year, or how the year will go. Example; say you saw a Starling, high odds of that in most of America. Starlings travel and nest in large flocks, and especially roost in large groups so your new year could be full of group issues. It could be a message to be more social in the coming year, or if only one Starling could mean you need to socialize less, or even that you need to forge your own path rather than follow the flock. You would need to see the bird and then read up on it and see what part of its behavior seems to ring true for you.I recommend reading on-line birding sites like Cornell’s, and the Ted Andrew’s books about animal totems. That’s what we do here.

Some hardcore birders will travel to exotic locales so they are almost guaranteed to see a bird that they’ve never seen, or that few people will ever be able to cross off their life list. A life list, for those who don’t bird watch, is a list of the birds you’ve seen in your life. Some Birders are heavy on the list and very serious about crossing off species. Some of them are very competitive with each other on who can cross off the rarest bird. I’m not a big one for the life list. I’ll make notes when I see a new bird, and I have been making notes of days and special circumstances in my Peterson’s guide since college, but the official list, not my thing.

One year my first bird of the year was a mammal. I took the dogs out twice and there was not a bird around, but squirrels were everywhere. Squirrels are often a message that you need to balance work and play more, as in working too much and not playing enough, or the reverse. Guess which side of the play/work equation I fall into? Anyone who gets that answer wrong hasn’t been reading my blog very long. I have made progress in this last year with the play, but work still predominates, but then I love my work most of the time. It is part of my play.

I will be looking for my first bird of the year when New Year’s Eve fades into New Year’s Day. What kind of year will it be? Robin was an insanely productive year. Cardinal a very spiritually rich, and productive one. Dove was about coming to terms with women and the issues of being a woman. You don’t have to believe, or even do it, but its a tradition where one of my hobbies and lifelong interests meets up nicely with my path of faith. So, I thought I’d share. Have fun with it, or sleep in long past dawn and that first twittering chorus of feathered friends. Come to think of it, we’re kid free for the first time in a decade over New Years. I am so not seeing dawn tomorrow. Somehow that doesn’t make me sad. The bird for the year will be there when I need to see it.