Every perch tells a story, every path teaches a lesson.
The Perch and the Path is a personal field journal rooted in birding, naturalist learning, and stewardship. It’s a place to document observation in motion — noticing, learning, and showing up where it matters.
Posts follow two threads. The Perch holds moments of birding and observation. The Path reflects on learning, service, and responsibility. Some days are quiet. Some are uncomfortable. All of them are part of how I’m finding my way.
The Perch
A place of stillness, attention, and honest looking. It represents the moments of pause in birding—the leaning against a fence, the quiet scan of a shoreline, the long wait beneath winter branches—where noticing happens before understanding. The Perch is not about mastery or lists, but about learning how to see: patterns, absences, uncertainty, and surprise. These posts hold field notes, identification struggles, seasonal observations, and small moments of connection with birds and place. From the Perch, nothing is rushed. You sit, you watch, and you let the landscape teach at its own pace.
The Path
Action, responsibility, and learning carried forward. It represents the ongoing work of becoming a naturalist in practice—not through credentials, but through participation, service, and reflection. The Path includes volunteering, stewardship, board work, and the quiet decisions about how to care for land, organizations, and communities. These posts explore what it means to turn observation into action, curiosity into commitment, and knowledge into usefulness. The Path isn’t linear or polished. It bends, slows, doubles back, and continues anyway—shaped by effort, humility, and the understanding that caring well is something learned over time.