Before D discovered the joys of birding, there was only one group of “birds” that interested him — the Penguins, the hockey team that over the years has brought him immense joy and soul-crushing heartache in almost equal measure, and which has likely cost him years off his life. Still in high school, D watched every minute of the 5OT marathon against the Flyers, the longest hockey game in the modern era, which ended in a devastating Pens defeat. Although the result simply knotted the semifinal at two games apiece, the loss was so deflating the Penguins never recovered, losing the next two games and having their season end at the hands of their most bitter rivals after initially going up 2-0 in the series. In college, D attended games all over the northeast — NYC, New Jersey, Long Island, Boston. That was a dark time, as the Pens were basement dwellers for half-a-decade. D and his friends arrived late for one game in Boston in which the Penguins had opened the scoring. D had missed the lone goal they netted; the Bruins scored the next seven. In 2016, however, when his team won it all, D attended game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals — the only time, incidentally, he has set foot in Pittsburgh despite rooting for Mario’s team since his grade school days. Last night, the Pens’ season was once again cut short by the Flyers — another overtime affair, the one silver lining being that the game did not run deep into the night as the one in 2000 had. Truth be told, the Penguins over-performed expectations this year — a season they were projected to tank to position themselves for a chance to draft generational talent. Instead, they wound up making the playoffs for the first time in four years. Typically, once D’s hockey season ends, he turns to baseball, but it’s hard to get really excited about baseball when the young season is only 30 games deep, and there are still more than 130 games to be played before the postseason. Instead, D is burying his sporting loss by turning back to the other birds that bring him joy. We have a four-day weekend thanks to a local holiday and are planning to spend it out and about with D’s Peace Corps birding friends. This post also represents an important milestone in that D, perennially behind on sorting his photos, has finally worked through the prior year’s backlog. Pictured from top to bottom, a handful of gems from last year’s travels and a few favorites from our most recent trip to Cuenca: waved albatross (Galapagos), violet-throated metaltail (Cuenca, an Ecuador endemic), American oystercatcher (Galapagos), American kestrel, great thrush, white-crowned manakin (Oriente).
