Getting to know the neighbors

The arrival of daylight saving time is bittersweet.

 While the time change typically means that long, lazy summer days are just around the corner, it also means that dawn arrives late – after 8 a.m. in the spring. Our neighborhood sits in the shadows of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains , so I am heading off to my teaching job by the time it is light enough for the finches, sparrows and chickadees to congregate around our back yard feeder.

I often wonder why we change our clocks so that we have an extra hour of daylight to waste on driving home from work. If we left the clocks alone so many more of us could spend morning's wee hours sitting quietly in the yard with a cup of coffee and a tattered bird identification book, trying to name the chirping visitors that flutter around a $10 piece of plastic filled with seeds.

Longtime bird-watchers who sport life lists and $1,200 binoculars on harnesses probably would roll their eyes at such elementary pursuits, as most entry-level urban feeders are not going to attract anything that experts have not seen 100 times over. But they, too, started this way.

Although I now have started one of those life lists and spend a lot of my free time looking for birds, it took more than a year of flipping back and forth between pictures of sparrows and finches before I could tell the difference between a house finch and a house sparrow. Heck, it took almost that long to know whether I was looking at a finch or a sparrow.

And if I go out there one morning and can't figure out what "that little brown one" is called, no one's the wiser but the cat, and he doesn't care what they are called so long as they flit down tot he ground once in awhile. (No worries. He is too old to catch one, but even a cat deserves to dream.)

Birds are probably the most readily available type of wildlife to watch, especially in urban areas. But many of us know almost nothing about them.

We Americans spend a lot of time keeping score, from the endless testing of our kids to the near-constant rating and ranking of everything we buy, wear and eat. We know the thread-count of our bed sheets, the amount of fiber in a slice of bread and the level of good cholesterol in our blood. We can learn the commands on a new iPhone in minutes, yet many of us can’t name the birds that enter our yards or fly past our windows every day.

Nature doesn’t change its access codes or passwords. But we do have to show up. Learning to name a few of our feathered visitors takes patience and little time – commodities that are in woefully short supply for most of us.

Still, it won’t hurt children to eat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for breakfast on the back porch a couple of times a week. You don’t need a large yard or even good weather. A bird feeder mounted outside of a window and a few minutes spent there each morning will do (though you likely would enjoy a little fresh air before the day’s hysteria begins).

 Pretty soon you, too, will be the greeting the morning’s birds – some of which I am still calling “those little gray ones” --  and trying figure out why in the world we’re saving daylight for the other end of the day.