Perhaps so. For beginning birders, then, I offer the following.
First of all, there are hardly any birds.
Chances are you’ll get the most from your first time out if you come armed with the knowledge that there won’t be very many birds.
Certainly there are more birds at the tip of Point Pelee than you’re used to seeing, for example, in your apartment.
But on the first rainy pre-dawn that you arrive at the park you will hear this: “They say last week was fabulous,” or, “Maybe it’s too windy today.”
The point is, the birds are not there now.
Where are they? Let’s go look!
As a novice, you might imagine that you’ll be spending your days in leafy glades and sunny meadows. Surely, you’re thinking, the pleasures of birding are bound up in the enjoyment of the natural landscape. This might once have been so.
But the bird of today is partial to motel parking lots and garbage dumps, and to something called a . . . sewage lagoon. And once you’ve exhausted the sights in the park, this is where you’ll be going.
A word on sewage lagoons. For those of us for whom a little sewage goes a long way, this might seem a strange spot to pass the time. But nothing can spoil the pleasure of teetering on the edge of a lake of human waste faster than clinging to narrow human notions of natural splendour.
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