Worth it

It was a good month.

• 32 species of warbler, or 33 if you count the brief, blurry, fly-away glimpse of the Kentucky Warbler that Peter and Fay Vale had been looking at.
• Three different species of nightjar, including a perched Chuck-will's-widow, a perched Whippoorwill, and a Common Nighthawk.
• And a Mass Audubon Birdathon that I was so into that I literally birded until I puked.
  

No, really. After a few hours of birding on Friday evening (Manx Shearwaters!), I got far too little sack time, and was up at oh-dark-thirty. Or maybe quarter of oh-dark. So I started the day overtired. And underdressed. Somehow I had the notion that it was going to warm up throughout the day. I wore a pair of shorts and a couple of t-shirts. It was cold but tolerable early, and I kept going, because hey -- it was going to warm up. I brought something to drink, but not really enough. So I was a bit dry. And did I mention cold?

The offshore breeze in Nahant didn't help. But I got a break whenever we got back into the car, and hey -- it was going to warm up. As the day wore on and the birds piled up, I was officially cold, and officially dehydrated. I tried to ignore the physical discomfort, which began to coalesce into a whopping headache. But I'm a gamer (if I spin it right), and we were raising money for charity, and the more birds the better.

So we kept birding, and I kept ignoring, and we made it all the way through to the end of the count at 6 p.m. And then I crashed. The headache was brutal by this point, and I'd been cranking the heat in the car well beyond the usual preferences of my good-sport carmates, Linda Pivacek and Sherry Smith. They'd both offered to drive earlier, but I'd thanked them and said it wasn't necessary. Now it was starting to sound like a good idea. I stopped to buy some Advil, and after a too-little-too-late stop for a Coke and a few hot fries at the McDonald's on Route 1, I handed Sherry the keys.

Some people have problems with motion sickness when they ride in a car. I'm not usually susceptible, but this wasn't usually. And when one is susceptible, it seems that the driver's seat is the place to be, because it gives you a focus. But there I was in the passenger seat, and I started to feel funny, so I clearly had some more ignoring to do. I kept ignoring for a while, when my wife Nancy called. After a brief conversation with her that I cut rather shorter than I would have otherwise, I asked Sherry to pull over, and I stopped ignoring and commenced heaving.

But you know what? I'd seen 101 species in the previous 24 hours, including the Chuck-will's-widow that Sherry had spotted, and we'd raised a bunch of money for Mass Audubon's Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary in Topsfield. And once home, I took a hot shower, and Nancy put some food into me, and I felt like a slightly washed-out version of myself again. And it was all worth it.