Wellbeing Through Wildfowl!

Wellbeing Wednesday is dead. There are two reasons for this comment, the primary one being the fact that wellbeing is not just for Wednesdays, but also because I don't want to be constrained by the days of the week in my blog. From this point on, I will not be using that title for my wellbeing-themed posts. I toyed with 'wellbeing weekly' but again that limits posts to being once a week, which is not how this is supposed to work. My next port of call was the AI on my phone, so I asked it for some ideas. They were all too specific, so I will take each post as it comes and think of an appropriate title for it when I am writing.

Yesterday, I took my father for a visit to Slimbridge Wetland Centre for a day of birdwatching. He has been through some health struggles this year and is not feeling well enough to do the drive up from Somerset, so I volunteered to be his taxi for the day. I am a keen birdwatcher myself, but not to the extent he is as I would definitely describe him as a 'twitcher'.

Apart from the obvious benefits of birdwatching, such as being out in the fresh air, I noted that the hobby falls under the umbrella of 'collecting' that I wrote about in yesterday's post. Thankfully, the days of egg-collecting as a hobby are long gone now, but 'twitchers' are still essentially 'collecting' birds in the way that train spotters collect trains.

The way it works is this: at the start of each year, a twitcher starts on zero, and then they record every variety of bird they see in the wild over the course of the next 12 months. That gives them their 'score,' which is zeroed at the end of the year. The caveat 'in the wild' is vital, as you cannot artificially inflate your score by travelling to zoos etc.

Our visit yesterday was an extremely timely one, as I was able to see the wellbeing benefits that the other birdwatchers were getting from their hobby first hand. I saw a huge sense of community, even though most of the visitors had never met before, with people helping each other out to locate specific birds and even sharing their terrifyingly long-lensed cameras and telescopes so that their fellow twitchers could add another 'tick' to their lists.

Most of the birdwatchers there could also be described as being part of the older generation, so the sense of community could realistically be even more important to them than for much younger people. You could literally see the twinkle in their eyes as they raced around to the next 'hide', hoping to spot something new.

One could apply some of the other collecting criteria I discussed in my last post to them, too, but the sense of being part of a community was definitely the strongest from an outsider's perspective. I will be honest; even as an amateur, I felt some of it, too.

I have to say, though, that my warm feeling towards our feathered friends does not extend to all birds. Today was stressful enough already as I was taking my two lovely ragdoll kittens to the vets to be neutered, but when I returned home, I found that two pigeons had found their way into my study through an open window. The gap in the window was large enough for them to get in but not large enough for them, in their startled state, to get out. So after catching and releasing them, I then had to do a quick but thorough deep clean of the room before I let the cats out of their travel carrier. So pigeons, I am afraid you are off the list. Seagulls, too, but that's another story!

So, if you are stuck for something to collect as part of your ongoing wellbeing strategy, I would suggest considering birds, or at least something that you are spotting, rather than physically collecting. I would say that it is cheap, which was one of my criteria for a good collection, but some of the kit I saw yesterday suggests otherwise! I don't think you need to go overboard, though, and birdwatching certainly fulfils the other criteria I suggested that a collection should fulfil. There are lots of places you can do it, so I challenge you to start your count today!