Okay, that soap sounds amazing. I guess I'll have to throw my hat into the ring, too.
My number
one hobby (outside of the chickens, of course) is birding. I've loved birds as long as I can remember, even before we started with the chickens, so birding is just a further extension of my passion for all things avian. So, basically, I go out in nature somewhere and just sit quietly for hours until a bird comes to me. Then, it's a battle to see the bird clearly and completely enough to get a positive ID without moving around so much that it flies off.

Sounds super fun, right? (No, but really, it is quite peaceful and relaxing.

)
Our woods here is one of my favorite places to go birding because it gives me the opportunity to see how it's doing out there. The woods is mid-succession, maybe even slightly early succession at the understory level, because my grandparents ran hogs through there decades ago, but the surrounding area was more recently (you know, only 15-20 years ago) farmed for crops and is in the earlier, grass-forb to shrubby-seedling stage of succession. That kind of texture isn't necessarily a bad thing for species. I keep a 'life list' of bird species I spot and more than 80 species on that list were spotted here, mostly where the woods meets that recovering cropland.
Unfortunately, I don't have a camera with a long enough lens to do any good bird photography while I'm at it. We do have bird feeders on the back deck (away from where the chickens could get near them), though, where I occasionally take pictures. Here is a really shadowy but still somewhat adorable Tufted Titmouse (
Baeolophus bicolor) at one of the feeders:
A Northern Cardinal male (
Cardinalis cardinalis) on a branch outside the living room window:
And a panorama of the woods during early May this year. This was around the time I spotted an American Woodcock (
Scolopax minor) in this area. He did a lot of displaying those evenings, but I never was able to catch him in the act. Fingers crossed for next spring! You can see where the woods just sort of stops and the early succession shrubs begin in the background, here:
I hope I didn't ramble too much! I love seeing what others do outside of chickening.
