Okay so for context, Jasper does not care about birds.
He has never cared about birds. When I showed him a photo of a pileated woodpecker last March he said "cool chicken" and went back to his phone. I want that on record before I explain why we drove two hours through the Cascades in forty-two-degree drizzle to attend a birding festival.
The reason is that he saw the words "Birders' BBQ" and stopped listening after "BBQ."
That's it. That's the whole reason.
He did not read the brochure. He saw my screen for approximately one second while I was looking up the Leavenworth Spring Bird Fest, registered the presence of grilled food, and announced that he was "really into birds actually, always had been, they were fascinating animals." I said birds weren't technically animals and he said "see, this is why I need to learn more about them" and started packing.
We got there and Jasper immediately borrowed my binoculars — the good ones, the ones I researched for three weeks — and aimed them at a guy eating a pretzel across the town square. "Bird activity," he said seriously.
I want to be clear that Leavenworth in May is genuinely beautiful, even under a low grey sky with construction cones on Front Street and a folk band playing somewhere near the new biergarten. The birding groups were these lovely focused people in sensible vests with laminated checklists, moving quietly along the Wenatchee River with a kind of communal reverence. An expert named Carol was explaining the call of a Cassin's vireo and everyone was nodding and I was genuinely moved.
Jasper was reading the BBQ menu.
At some point he wandered into an actual expert-led walk, purely by accident, because he followed a group of people thinking they were heading toward food. He was gone for forty-five minutes. When he came back he had a damp festival map, someone's spare rain poncho, and a look on his face I had never seen before.
"Did you know," he said, "that birds have hollow bones."
I said yes, I knew that.
"They're hollow so they can fly," he said. "The bones are hollow. For flying."
I said I was aware.
"Carol said there's a white-headed woodpecker in the ponderosa pines up the ridge and nobody's confirmed the sighting yet this season." He paused. "I think we should go find it."
I looked at him. He was wearing the borrowed poncho. He had somehow acquired a laminated checklist. He was holding my binoculars with both hands like a man who had just discovered a calling.
I said Jasper, twenty minutes ago you called a Steller's jay "a fancy crow."
"I was wrong about the crow," he said. "Carol explained it. The crest is diagnostic."
"Diagnostic," I repeated.
"That's the word." He showed me where he'd written it on his hand in pen, below a small drawing of what I think was supposed to be a woodpecker but looked more like a distressed capital T.
We did not find the white-headed woodpecker. We hiked partway up a muddy trail in the rain until Jasper's sneakers made a sound he described as "biblically wet" and we turned around. He filed a non-sighting in the community app, which he had downloaded and was now using with complete earnestness, and wrote in the notes field: "conditions poor, morale high, hollow bones confirmed."
Then we went to the BBQ.
Jasper got a brat and stood with a group of serious birders comparing checklists. He had one thing on his list: Steller's jay. He had incorrectly written it as "Stellar" and then crossed it out and rewritten it twice. He showed everyone. Everyone was very kind about it.
On the drive home his phone was on the dashboard playing bird calls for identification practice. He got three wrong and one right and pumped his fist when the app said Correct! He smelled like woodsmoke and damp poncho.
"Next year," he said, "we should come for the whole weekend."
Outside, the mountains were going dark and the highway was clear and open ahead of us. I had a thermos of cold coffee and a boyfriend who had written "hollow bones" on his hand.
"Sure," I said. "Yeah. We should."
I meant it.