Birds, Parks, and Boardgames

In Which Our Asses Have Been Parked and Our Wings Have Been Spanned

Sharonda "Sam" Woodfin

07 Jan 2026 • 5 min read

My winning game mat at the end of our first game of Wingspan. I was especially excited to add the Northern Cardinal to my sanctuary. Not sure how those Pied-billed Grebe eggs came out that particular green, though!

It started with just a game of Parks. I'm not sure where it ends.

I bought the Parks (2E) Summit Edition from Keymaster Games for my wife for Christmas. I bought Parks: Roll & Hike for her, too. We opened all of our gifts to one another on the day before Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Eve, we played Parks for the first time.

It was the most fun I've ever had playing a board game.

It was like a little fire in my brain, and the next day, I started pushing Linda to get a National Parks pass, or a California State Parks pass.

Parks–the game–made me want to get us up and out and into the parks–the places.

That initial game took three hours for us to figure out, set up, and play. And every one of those 180 minutes was catalytic.

The parks I was able to visit in our first game of Parks (2nd Edition): Everglades, Hawai'i Volcanoes, Isle Royale, Olympic, Redwood, White Sands, Yosemite, and Zion National Parks. Mammoth Cave and Indiana Dunes National Parks can be seen hanging around, upside down like bats, unvisited on the game board.

On Christmas Morning, while Linda was still sleeping, I made a spreadsheet to keep track of all the National Parks I was able to visit in the game. I know it's unrealistic to expect to visit them all in the physical sense, but I'd at least like to visit them all within the confines of the game.

The Parks Roll & Hike game box, along with its contents: A game mat, an eraser, five dice, five landmark markers, one boot token, a pack of pencils, four notebooks, six park cards, the Official Park Guide, and a couple of reference cards. — Parks: Roll & Hike, unboxed.

But that day, we played two games of Parks: Roll & Hike, instead of Parks, proper. Neither of us had played a roll-and-write game before. Neither of us thought we'd like roll-and-write games.

As it turns out, we both love this one.

And it served to further encourage the need to get out and explore. It also encouraged us to try more games.

Barnes & Noble had a post-Christmas sale from the 26th through the 28th of December. We didn't go on the 26th because Linda had to work and because it was raining and this is Orange County, California, and driving in the rain here isn't like driving in the rain in Stoddard County, Missouri.

But we sure went to that sunny-day sale on the 27th. Oh, yes, we did.

We went to the B&N in Tustin, and by this point, I was convinced that I needed (yes, I know, and I chose this word because it truly is the right one) to try Wingspan.

I bought the game. We came home. We played. The first game took three-and-a-half hours.

On the 28th–the last day of the sale–we went to B&N in Orange. Linda bought Wingspan: Asia, Wingspan: Oceania Expansion, and Amy Tan's The Backyard Bird Chronicles. I bought The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds: California and Amy Tans' The Backyard Bird Journal.

We came home and played the original Wingspan three more times.

That night, we started reading The Backyard Bird Chronicles together in bed.

Wingspan: Asia Duet Mode map board and Duet Mode tokens (yin and yang halves; the white ones are mine). This is the thing that sets Wingspan: Asian apart from the original game. And if I have to look at it sideways, then so do you.

We've since played Wingspan: Asia in Duet Mode. We've played the Oceania expansion. We've both joined eBird. We've started the free, introductory course on eBird. We've both installed The Cornell Lab's eBird and Merlin apps on our iPhones. We've installed Wingsong (an app which plays the song of the bird on whichever Wingspan card you scan with it), as well. We've added the Barnes & Noble version of the first edition of Parks to our board game collection, and we've played it, too. We've added and played Finspan ('though neither of us can swim; maybe it'll inspire tide pool exploration). I've added a Parks (1e) sheet to my Parks workbook. I've made spreadsheets for the Wingspan and Wingspan: Asia games, one for Oceania, one for Finspan, and one for Orange County bird species based on information from the All About Birds book.

Linda has dug out her binoculars. We've each unearthed our old digital cameras: a Canon SD1000 for me and a pair of Nikons for Linda. Linda disinterred her Nikon FE2–that's a film camera, y'all–and all of its lenses.

We've even gone on our first outing as fledgling birders. This outing was a weekend visit to the San Joaquin Marsh & Wildlife Sanctuary, where I snapped mostly horrible, digitally-zoomed iPhone photos that I'm too ashamed to share, with a pair of notable exceptions:

A moth perched on the screen door of the Audubon House at the San Joaquin Marsh & Wildlife Sanctuary. The photo was taken on January 3rd at 1:21 PM. Judging by its antennae and a teeny bit of internet research, I think that this moth is a female, though I've yet to identify its species.

A woman wearing Ray-Bans, jeans, a black jacket, and a black t-shirt that says "DATA" (but with a heart where the first "a" should be) stands in front of a framed graphic showing the wing spans of the California Condor, the Bald Eagle, the Turkey Vulture, the Osprey, and the Peregrine Falcon. The woman's arms are spread to her sides, and her fingertips almost reach the width of the Osprey's wingspan. — Linda spreading her wings at the marsh. My wife apparently has the wingspan of an Osprey! (P.S. If you see weird pixels in this photo, it's because a stranger's reflection was caught in the glass. I manually obscured most of that reflection with a simple paintbrush in the GIMP.)

We're planning to re-visit both the Fullerton Arboretum and the San Joaquin Marsh, and to make exploratory visits to the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve and Upper Newport Bay.

We're also hoping to buy a contemporary Nikon digital camera before spring preens her wet, green plumes.

It's as if, now, later in our lives–as Linda glides toward retirement, and I slide toward whatever my joblessness can slide to–we've opened up a whole new passion that didn't end with games, but began with them, then stretched to encompass so much more.

Y'all.

Is this what Pokémon Go feels like?