White Birds

White Crane Spreads Its Wings* is my favorite Tai Chi move. I love the name and I love the "feel" of the move. It opens up the chest and stretches the spine. I think of big white birds stretching their wings as I stretch mine.

I've been in great need of stretching my spine - laid low by a virus in my inner ear. It's been a frustrating few weeks. I've wobbled around a bit - some trips and errands could not be cancelled.  Bless DH as he performed driver duties without complaint. But I have tried to rest and heal as much as possible.**

While being almost home-bound should allow for some chores to be done, it has been slow going....no bending over, no looking up, no quick moves of the head...

As equilibrium slowly returned, DH agreed to take a Sunday drive.*** And I had just the place - one where a bird watcher has reported all kinds of things. The location is nearby and the map shows many ponds.

It sprinkled a bit as we headed down the small country road. Egrets populated almost every pond along the way - Great Egrets and Cattle Egrets were everywhere.

We laughed at ourselves. How many birders do you know? How many of them go birding without their binoculars. Well, you know two. It happens to us more than we would dare admit.

Still, it was delightful to be out of the house. We stopped here and there in order to get a photo. We counted the birds we could identify and those we couldn't.

We saw 3 Mockingbirds, 15 Great Egrets, 30 Cattle Egrets (easy - small white birds hanging out with the cows), and probably 20 more egrets we could not identify well from a distance. There were also about 60 little brown birds.

Heavens! We need to get a bit better at this before the Christmas Bird Counts. And I suspect remembering the binoculars would be a good start.

Great Egret in flight. They were spooked pretty easily.

I suspect that many of the "ponds" we saw were wet-weather ponds...full only due to recent storms.

We spooked a number of the residents too - a couple of cars drove slowly past as we drove slowly checking out the birds.

I'd love to go back and listen in the evening - certainly there are frogs in these ponds, but I'm not sure I could talk DH into it. I'll have to give it a try.

NOTES:

*http://thewayoftaichi.com/white-crane-spreads-its-wings2/

**This includes exercises I can only describe as torture. Still, if they work.... I'm beginning to think improvement resulted from time, meds, rest, exercises, and Reiki!

***We talked about it three times before we finally got out of the house...and yes, we are THOSE Sunday drivers. But we do pull over so faster vehicles can get around us.