Eno Morning

If you limit yourself to reading my blog, you’d perhaps be forgiven for thinking that birding with a baby is somewhat easy (with the exception of a few minor mishaps). I hear you, I thought so too. But it’s just like a baby to lull you into a sense of competence and then rip that away from you when you least expect it and when you’re least prepared to deal with it. In fact that, along with pooping of course, may well be the thing they’re best at. I mention all of this because I need to set the stage for this most recent edition of “Birding with Baby: The Drinking Bird Experiments”.

Noah, at two months, has been coming excruciatingly close to sleeping through the night. I know that there are certainly parents out there who would dream of such a situation, but it poses an interesting problem. Almost through the night means he’s been getting up fairly regularly between 5 and 6 AM, which is this awkward gray area between taking the time to put him back down for a couple hours, or cutting our losses and starting the day. On a morning when I’m planning on taking Noah birding, it’s even more difficult. If he woke up at 4 I’d surely put him back down, and at 6 we’d get ready to go, but 5? That’s so early, and even though the birds are singing outside our window by that point, many of the places we’d go are still locked and barred.

See, I didn’t know that last part yet, and it put a serious kink in my plan. I had intended to visit a brand new birding location, Occoneechee Mountain State Rec Area, the highest point in Orange County, that I discovered on eBird. But imagine my dismay when I pulled up at around 6:30 AM to find a gate locked up like Fort Knox and a sign saying it opened at 8, which c’mon, that’s way too late to open any place that looks to attract birders.

So I called audible and headed over to nearby Eno River State Park. Even without the thrill of discovery and the opportunity to rack up birds on the rarely visited Occoneechee Mountain eBird list, the Eno is a good place to spend a morning and had Louisiana Waterthrushes besides, which is nice.

Or at least, it used to have Louisiana Waterthrushes. The trail that runs along the river has apparently been subject to a serious rennovation project since I’d been there last. A path at least 15 feet wide had been cut though the prime waterthrush area to lay down a fancy new path. That’s not to say that it wasn’t entirely needed, the old path was knotty and pretty rough going and probably needed something, but the clearance was substantial and fairly shocking. There were no Waterthrushes singing here this spring, and probably not for the next few either, at least until the brush reclaims the cleared hillside.

Now this is when things started to get interesting on the Noah front. As I backtracked from the trail site to hit a different and less impacted trail, the kid started kvetching. By the time I’d gotten halfway down it, he was outright raging. There were probably a couple reasons for this. The drive to Occoneechee and Eno cut into my “get Noah to fall asleep on the trail time”, taken as it was by sleepytime in the carseat. By the time I’d arrived at Eno, gotten Noah situated in the Baby Bjorn, and headed down the trail with no Waterthrushes, we were getting dangerously close to his next feeding time which tends to overlap with the uncomfortably full diaper interval. We had both on our hands here, and a hungry baby, at least one not already lulled to sleep by walks outside, will not be denied. A hungry baby with a full diaper uncomfortably crammed into a sling is a force to be reckoned with. Besides, you can’t hear birds if you’ve got a crying baby strapped to your chest, and if you can’t hear birds summer birding is way too hard.

So we went back to the car, got some food in his belly and a clean diaper on his butt and tried to decide whether I wanted to test him again. I eventually decided no, and it was the right decision as he cried most of the way home. I consider this an anomoly, the perfect storm as it were, for the baby/birding breakdown. Noah’s unfortunately not at the age where he can roll with the punches very well. Does anyone out there with experience birding with a baby find anything similar?

For all the times he’s appeared to enjoy it, and he definitely had a few of those moments before the screaming started, it’s still worth persevering. But be aware future birding parents (you know who you are), it’s not all cake. It just mostly is.