Friday Night in Cape May

It’s been difficult to find a few moments to myself since returning from Cape May. I’m trying to catch up on undone calculus homework, undone laundry and chores, and an email inbox that threatens to blow open at any moment.

Further complicating the situation, my thoughts and impressions about the weekend are almost too numerous, too jumbled to organize. That, along with the post-vacation blahs, has made it hard to put any coherent posts together.

I covered the Friday birding in my last post; now I’ll move on to the Friday evening Birds and Beers session at Jackson Mountain Café. They let us have the top floor, TVs on “Meerkat Manor” and then “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” playing in the background, and a waiter who probably cursed us bitterly every time he had to climb up and down those stairs yet again for another brewski or martini.

All these birders were lifers for me, this being our first in-person meeting. What a great bunch of birds!

Susan Gets Native and Sharon the Birdchick discover digital photography, with the incredibly nice Jay Davis of Birdjam in the background.

BornAgainBirdWatcher, Laura Somewhere in NJ, and a gloomy sea captain who obviously disapproved of our mirth.

Birdchick, performing an energetic display ritual and consuming one of her species' favorites, a dirty martini. I don’t want to anthropomorphize, but I’d guess she’s thinking, “Another bride/ Another June/ Another sunny honeymoon/ Another season, another reason/ For makin' whoopee.”

In the “It’s a Small World After All” category, Elizabird and I discovered that we’d gone to high school together! We didn’t recognize each other until she learned that I was from Harlingen, and then she came over and we reminisced and hugged and laughed our heads off, thinking about our time in drama classes, Children’s Theatre, and other antics. Liz is now a big-time birder, married to big-time birder Jeff Gordon of Jeff Gyr fame, and (as if that’s not enough) she was instrumental in starting the Rio Grande Valley Bird Festival! How incredible is it that after 25 years, we would meet in a bar in Cape May, NJ, brought together by our mutual love of birds!? Life never ceases to amaze me.

Here we all are, the birding bloggers: (back row from left) Laura from NJ, (that's Harry Potter and Ron Weasley on the TV), Beth from Easy Ecoliving and Patrick from the Hawk Owl’s Nest, Jeff Gyr and Elizabird, Birdchick and martini, Sheri the hummingbird specialist and author; (front row from left) John the BornAgainBirdwatcher, me looking like some sort of thuglet doing a very scary gangsta pose, Susan Gets Native, Susan at Lake Life, Amy Wildbird on the Fly, and Mike from 10,000 Birds.

What a flock! Next time, we'll move on to Saturday, which started out rainy and miserable but ended up sunny and gorgeous.