Why I started birdwatching

Someone asked me recently how I first got into birdwatching. It's a fairly recent hobby for me. There were three factors:

1. At an interview, the committee asked me about my hobbies and I couldn't think of any. I had tried hobbies before, but they never stuck. (I said I watched a lot of A&E's Pride and Prejudice. I didn't get the job.)
   
2. My therapist recommended finding a hobby as a way to de-stress. We brainstormed but couldn't really think of any good hobbies. They required too much commitment or talking to people.
   
3. I moved into a house 3 years ago that had a lot of yard birds. Birds I didn't know (like mockingbirds). So I thought, here's my hobby. I'll sit on the back deck and look at birds and call it my hobby.

It kind of snowballed from there. It's one thing to watch birds, but then you want to know what they're called. You need a book and binoculars, which I had. But then I really needed someone to tell me about the birds, so I started going on local field trips. And there you have it. Now I have an expensive pair of binoculars (plus 2 others), 3 or 4 bird guides, a birdwatching DVD, 2 sets of birdsong CDs, I'm the local field trip organizer, I've been on an overnight trip (and going again in October), and tomorrow I'm going on my first twitch. A "twitcher" is someone who looks for rarities. Right now there's a reddish egret at Ranking Bottoms. You hardly ever see those in the continental U.S., much less in TN. Plus it has a habit of "dancing" as it looks for food in the shallows. I really want to see that.