Break and Bird

At the school I used to teach in, we had this thing called D.E.A.R. time which stood for Drop Everything And Read. Simply put, it was library time when the kids were given an opportunity to just stay in the library, browse through the books and do nothing but read.

I'd love to have something like that for birding. But Drop Everything And Bird would spell D.E.A.B. and it really wouldn't sound quite so nice. So, I just went with "Break and Bird" for those moments when I just stop whatever it is I'm doing and watch some birds. And that's what we did on our way to have lunch a few days ago.

We were driving in the UP Diliman campus on our way to have lunch when we spotted hundreds of swiftlets flying in the airspace above our car! Jops mentioned seeing them earlier when he passed through UP. He stepped on the brakes and parked the car on the side of the road. Out came a couple of bins (luckily we were going to meet Mike to turn over the bins), notebook and pencil and we  observed the birds.

We stayed for around ten minutes, and when the birds flew further away, we drove on to have lunch. It was  really nice to just drop everything and bird for a moment to get lost in the world through my bins before settling back to "reality".