"Everything's fine until it's not, and then everything goes to hell."

I found this quote by Doug Erwin, a paleobiologist at Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in a book he wrote about climate.

The New York Times of Oct. 14 carried a story discussing various ways people add a moment or two of brightness to their day. Brightness is a good idea after a dose of climate.

One man described in the story ate a pastry for breakfast, his moment of diversion. A woman counted yellow doors as she went about her day in Boston. A couple set aside 30 minutes each morning to watch birds, no phones allowed.

I vote for pastry, and twice for birds.

Jude, my wife, and I share part of our mornings with breakfast, newspapers (two) and Sudoku. Jude puzzles while I occasionally read news items aloud. More and more the stories fall in the category described by that paleobiologist.

Birds, however, save the day. We eat and read in front of patio doors leading to our deck and our bird feeders. We alert each other to whatever catches our eye. Birding is something we've always done together.

Birds keep me in that moment, an overused expression describing the focus that birds can require.

I've have no particular philosophical approach to life. I don't know Zen, for example. I've never attended one of those seminars that might teach me to greet the dawn with unbound enthusiasm.

Because I find our world evermore uncertain. I simply try paying attention as often as possible to something other than current events.

Birds help to keep me doing that. If you don't stay focused, you simply won't see the birds. They're mostly small, cryptic and fast on the wing.

I enjoy looking for birds as much as seeing them. It's the same pleasure I remember from hunting, when my father and uncles and I walked woods and corn rows in Kanabec County, shotguns in our arms.

It was being there that counted, moments of high anticipation. I was focused. It was fun, pheasants or not. I've had similar experiences with binoculars. Searching need not always be successful.

I admire birds because they care not a whit for us. They don't care if we are naughty or nice. They don't concern themselves with our religion or politics or bank accounts.

We impact their lives in various negative ways; I doubt if they understand, in our sense of that word, what we do to them. (And that's probably a good thing.)

Birds were here before humans and will be here when we're gone, a comforting thought. A different world always will have birds. We're trying, but I don't believe we'll wipe them out, at least not crows.

On a walk today, in a park or browsing our yard, I would not see many birds, comparing this day to another in May or June. Expectations change with the season.

There is a different pleasure, though, in small numbers. Each bird becomes an event, a moment made significant by its singularity.

Lifelong birder Jim Williams can be reached at woodduck38@gmail.com.