BirdWatching: Birdwatching by a Remote Monastery

On a trip last month through the Kakheti region of eastern Georgia, where we were reporting on the budding recovery of the Georgian winemaking traditions and efforts to combat wine fraud, we decided to take the long road back to Tbilisi, the capital, and use our travel time to tour Georgia's border with Azerbaijan. There, we heard, we would see not only some of the earliest and most remote sites of Georgian Christianity, but we might glimpse the beginning of the spring raptor migration, a wonder even more timeless. Our next appointment in Tbilisi was not until the night; we risked a few-hours jog off the main route.

The trip took us from the lush southern slopes of the Caucasus, the snow-cloaked peaks and black soils of Georgian wine country, to the semi-arid desert that borders the Azeri steppe. The road, a buckling stretch of Soviet asphalt that eventually gives way to a dirt track, passed from Sagarejo to David Gareji, an ancient monastery, where we planned to climb the dry ridge into the wind, to see what was soaring northward, bound for the breeding season ahead.

WHY: For me, watching birds has two principal meanings. First, it is about slowing down, about noticing. I have watched for birds since childhood, almost always as a complement to other things. This has been especially true in my fishing and hunting, where the process of entering the environment, and silently attuning yourself to water and land from which you hope to feed, opens your senses to the wild sights and sounds that envelop you throughout each day - if only you let them in. This occurs not just when I am outdoors in search of a meal. Birds are almost always there, somehow, to be seen on hurried walks to the subway station, or from passing trains and cars. Looking for birds allows me to pick up the currents and natural borders that a working life can obliterate from view and from thought. Even the most incidental bird watching delivers insights and affirmations about the vagaries of the seasons, the subtle shifts of streams and tide, the boundaries of vegetation and habitat, and motions of air, weather and planet.

Second, birds are about serendipity. They endlessly surprise. I rarely watch birds solely for the sake of watching birds, and have never been a list keeper, one of the highly committed birders who endeavor to see all of everything, by category. I cannot tell you my life "count," because I do not know it. I take what comes, and merely by watching, always looking, m
y memory brims with spontaneous sights.

The view from a cave near David Gareji, an ancient Georgian monastery

...one of the rarest birds the lammergeier, or bearded vulture, can be seen here if you are lucky...