Is this how it starts, I wonder, as I stand alone on the deck outside my tent, mere kilometres from Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and as far north as you can overnight in the Kruger National Park.
I'm shirtless, and shoeless, and wearing a floppy hat, possibly in this combination for the first time. At least since I could voluntarily dress myself. There’s a pair of binoculars around my neck, and I’m using them to zoom in on a black and white bird - a pied kingfisher, or maybe a giant - hovering frantically above the Luvuvhu river.
This scenario may well be the first and most obvious sign of my inevitable decline into middle age. But perhaps it also signals the slide into something seemingly related, and a little more unnerving: becoming a birder.