Multi-tasking Birding

It’s a good thing that we have no neighbors close by.  We have a 30 acre wooded parcel that has a nice mile long walking trail which I trod with the Vizsla two or three times a day.  I always have binoculars, and often a camera, and bird while I get some easy exercise and the dog roams freely.  The trail is still snow-covered and rather icy from our recent melts but today, I decided to incorporate another set of tasks: PT exercises for my pinched nerve.  (Which I promised not to write about until it was healed.)

My physical therapist has given me a number of nerve glide exercises to do to encourage my ulnar nerve to glide normally as I move my joints.  I usually do them down cellar but this morning, I thought, “Why not do them while walking?”  So, picture a 73-year-old guy, walking down a snowy path, binoculars strapped to him with a camera hanging off a shoulder, extending a mittened arm in sort of a ballet move, ending with a wrist roll.  Fortunately, the dog is oblivious to weirdness while hunting and no one else walks our woods trails.  I wonder why?

It was a nice way to get one more set of exercises in, especially since the birding is still pretty slow.  And it got me thinking that nearly all birders multi-task:  we bird while driving, cycling, canoeing, or sitting near a window in a meeting in springtime.  I do some birding from my airplane, especially for hawks, and I suspect that we could come up with quite a list of multi-tasking birding activities.  That’s a great thing about birding — it’s there for us all the time.

What’s your most unusual task while birding?