My BEST Birdwatching Day: The Glorious PINTAIL

Burnaby Lake is my happy place. I have an almost mystical connection to the birds here, which swim right up to the edge of the dock so you can photograph them up-close. I have never seen pintails in any of the other places I birdwatch. I also see sandhill cranes, dowitchers (sandpipers with longer legs), wood ducks, escaped white domestic ducks and doves who use the lake as a kind of sanctuary, and even the elusive Mandarin duck, which is so rare it made the local news.

It can all make me forget, for a while, the things I'm dealing with right now, including intractible physical pain which I can't talk to my doctor about. I have been dismissed, ignored and told to run along, go home and behave myself, so many times over the years that I have pretty much given up trying. This is how people become addicted to bootleg pain meds cut with fentanyl, but I hope I never get to that point. It's too bad when the "cure" is potentially worse than the disease. 

But until I go crazy with the pain and find a way to end it for good, I have my birds.