Over the last couple of years nature has become my safest place and I spend most of my free time watching and photographing birds with my wife. We’re a well-oiled machine these days; she carries the scope, I take the camera, and we both have binoculars around our necks and sometimes our little dog is attached to her waist. We spend hours walking and standing still, talking about what we’ve seen and staying silent. We make lists, try to learn bird calls, sometimes we can recognise a bird straight away and sometimes it takes some time, we meet new people, learn things and share sightings, we love it. Our bird list is modest compared to other birders but the thrill is in the doing it, in being there. I have depression and it isn’t something I’m often able to forget about. The first bird hide we sat in gave me an instant feeling of calm and I found it more mindful than meditation. It took no effort to sit back and enjoy what was happening in front of us because the view from the hide
I always hated winter. I hated the cold, the loneliness, the expectation of having to have the perfect Christmas with the perfect people, the dark, the rain, the sludge and the snow. I’ve never been diagnosed with SAD but my depression definitely kicked in harder than usual during winter. Winter was a time to go to work, get home and go straight to bed. Ignore all phone calls and messages, sleep as much as possible, eat every now and again, and wait for it to be over. It was a time for auto-pilot hibernation. A way to be alive without living at all. This feeling isn’t exclusive to winter but every single year I would fail to find anything to motivate me from November until as late as April. Winter is like a gift for birders. We can see into the trees, like an x-ray, unobstructed by leaves and green. We see bullfinches that usually find safety in denseness as they begrudgingly travel short distances looking for food. We see redwing and fieldfare. We see birds that have travelle