It was about this time last year that I noticed it or, I should say, noticed them: blue jays and bluebirds, cardinals and robins and — well, that was about all the species I could identify. But I wanted to learn more.

I asked a friend who’s a birder to help get me started, and we went for a walk around the Gilsland Farm Audubon Center in Falmouth, binoculars around our necks, looking for feathers and listening for chirps, which, I learned, is pretty much the extent of birding.

Most importantly, though, she introduced me to the Merlin Bird ID app, which can tell you what birds are around you by listening to their calls, and, since then, I’ve been using it to bird wherever I go, but mostly from my bed in the morning. I’ve retained nothing, which in a way makes it more fun, being continually amazed to find out I’m in the presence of a house finch or red-winged blackbird, as if it’s the first time.

This is one of the surprising things I’m learning about aging. While we hear all about the gray hair and the creaky knees and even, on the positive side, how much less we’ll care about what other people think, I wasn’t as prepared for my interests to suddenly change, opening up a whole new world of things I might like to do.

It turns out, these low-key activities are trendy too, with teens and TikTok users embracing the so-called grandmacore lifestyle by taking up hobbies like knitting and gardening. As much as I’d like to think that I’m just one of the kids, more realistically, my interest is a sign that I’ve turned the corner to middle age.

It happened like clockwork at 40, at the same time the words began to blur on my growing collection of pill bottles. It seems counterintuitive that, just when the routine of life should start wearing thin, you would instead become more fascinated with things that couldn’t hold your interest before, more easily entertained by the mundane. But I guess it makes sense biologically that, as our bodies start to break down, we would require less excitement to sustain our interest in life.

I probably would have realized what was coming if I had been paying closer attention to the older people around me, content with a crossword puzzle as any Sunday’s headlining act. Sundays, for me, used to be all about brunch. How exhausting that sounds now — a heavy meal in the late morning, leaving you with too little time before and too little energy after to get anything else accomplished. But it once was my whole reason for rousing on weekend mornings. Now? That’s the new flyer with the week’s supermarket specials dropping on my doorstep.

The birds help too, their chirps nudging me to reach for my phone to find out just who’s out there and, at the same time, let the blue light pry open my eyelids.

After I’ve identified the morning’s species — this week that included a Carolina wren — it’s time to make the mushroom coffee. That’s right, the regular stuff is too much for me now, and it’s been longer since I’ve had to ditch the dairy.

But it’s on my morning walk where I’ve made one of my biggest changes, something I never thought would happen: I’ve stopped wearing headphones.

I had always wondered how older people did it without getting bored, but after years of relying on music to zone out on a stroll, it became clear that, to clear my head, I was better off listening to nothing but the sound of traffic and nature — namely, the birds.