Thank you for posting this! In my 20s, I used to think of bird-watching as an "old people hobby," but I guess at 37, I'm now officially old, because I find birds fun to watch!
I want to set up a bird feeder after I get settled in my new home (in Washington state), but I was also thinking about the potential cost of bird seed. Maybe there are particular plants/trees that would also attract them? Obviously this would vary by region.
Are there any great online (free) sources for bird identification (by appearance or sound)? I'm sure Google would reveal a million, but I'm wondering what people actually use and like. As a kid in Virginia, my dad used to point out the birds at our feeder for me and tell me what each of them was. There are a lot of birds in Washington that I'm unfamiliar with, and I'd like to change that, but obviously the Dad method isn't going to work there!
(Am I the only one who has a sense of nostalgia connected to bird sounds? I never would have guessed it, but when I was back in Virginia visiting my parents last week, it was nice to hear so many familiar birds! I hadn't been there in the spring for years, so I hadn't heard them for years. I grew up only knowing them by sight, but last week there was one sound I was trying to identify, so I ended up listening to the songs of a lot of other birds online, and now it's really neat to be able to sit on the porch and think, "Hey, that's a cardinal!" "And that's a bluebird!")