I draw the line at raptors perching atop my bird feeder. He knows this; he's no slouch, this sharp-shinned hawk.
After a momentary stare-down that's become habit in recent weeks, he offers an apparently defiant waggle of his feathered rump, and departs. He'll get his, though. Sharp-shinned hawks are the Ma and Pa Kettle of the bird world -- his nested mate waiting expectantly in the woods 20 yards beyond the back door hulks over him, twice as large.
Such a deepening interest in birds, by choice or by circumstance, doesn't rise to the pastime sexiness levels of say, ice-climbing or wingsuit flying. Red Bull doesn't sponsor birding expeditions. Which leads, then, to one of those grim imponderables: Am I a nerd?
That is the dilemma that author Luke Dempsey describes in the opening pages of his riotously funny, utterly enthralling debut book, "A Supremely Bad Idea: Three Mad Birders and Their Quest to See it All."
Dempsey deliciously describes how he was sucked -- first reluctantly, then enthusiastically, like any self-respecting addict -- into the chirping, tweeting, ruffled-feathered vortex of hard-core birding.
That's birding, Dempsey points out, not to be confused with mere bird-watching. He happily acknowledges the tweedy image, then lightly dismisses it.
His coming-out begins innocently enough. Dempsey invites a couple, whose eccentricities often test the limits of their friendship, to his weekend home. The next morning, he awakes to find them missing, out on a birding jaunt. Dempsey is drawn into the web when he is dumbstruck by the beauty of a common yellowthroat. "Love swelled in my pancreas," he writes, "and I madly wanted to see more."
Such moments of transforming epiphany are something with which we can all identify. I recall my own experience when, working as a reporter in Red Wing, I accompanied a woman from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources as she conducted the annual midwinter bald eagle survey along the Mississippi River.
