This is how I started noticing birds. Even now, I’m not really a bird watcher, binoculars slung around my neck, standing quietly in a marsh, staring at a tree. No. But I’m an avid bird noticer.

This started in a year when the kids were very little. In fact, maybe only one of them had been born. I don’t know what year it was, and I don’t know what was on my mind. But I can see it in my mind. The meadow down by the canal was covered in snow, and the dog was off leash, bouncing along beside me. This was the old dog, not the new dog, neither of them with us anymore. I was trudging along through the snow, when I noticed some small, dark colored water birds floating along in the canal, dramatic little birds.

I’d not a scintilla of an idea what to call them, and in that moment, I thought, “Why don’t know what the birds are? How come I can’t name them? Why don’t I know anything about them?” I felt dumb, but also deeply intrigued by these small, black “ducks” with bright white crests.

They were Hooded Mergansers. The internet made short work of the mystery.

After noticing them, I began noticing other birds (and looking for the mergansers everytime I was down by the water). I got a bird guide. I talked about birds with my bird nerd friends. After three decades of relative obliviousness, I knew some stuff about birds.

Last week I was sick. Dead on my feet. Nothing I did seemed to make me better. And then Meghna said, “Let’s just go for a walk around the reservoir.” I was skeptical, but she had told me a few days before that the mergansers had arrived, and I thought, “They’ll cheer me up, for sure.”

They did. The thing I’ve noticed in the years since I first noticed them, is that they only arrive once winter has finally taken hold, not after the first freeze, or the first hint of winter, but only when the season has fully turned. Symmetrically, they only disappear again when winter is over.

It’s pretty fashionable at the moment (maybe since the pandemic) to pay closer attention to “nature,” like another of life’s myriad cure-alls. We just have to “forest bathe” or maintain a bird feeder or notice the shape of the morning light. All of these things are true to a degree. They work. They’re maybe just not miracles, because as with all things, it isn’t that you’re doing them, but the quality with which you’re doing them, that matters.

I notice the hooded mergansers are here, and that winter has arrived, and it makes me feel better.