When the answer to the simple question "what are you doing this weekend?" is "looking for a booby in Newcastle," it can get you into all sorts of trouble in the operating theatres.
But this is the conversation I had with the staff in my hospital on Friday afternoon.
Because a bird called the Cocos booby, never before recorded in Australia, had somehow ended up roosting on boats at Marks Point, on Lake Macquarie, far from its usual home of Cocos Island in Costa Rica.
Given my family's keen birdwatching pedigree and Newcastle roots, I had to see this vagrant and tick it off my list. So, on Saturday morning, with my teenage son happily in tow, we set off up the M1 in search of a booby.
Birdwatching, or twitching as it is widely known, is an increasingly popular pastime that is getting even young people off their screens and out into nature (where, ironically, they record their birding exploits and publish them on said screens).
Once in nature, indisputable health gains start to flow.
We know that our wellbeing benefits from birding. In one study, researchers at King's College London found that simply seeing or hearing birds provides significant mental health benefits, not just at the time of the encounter, but lasting for hours. There are many more such studies, all concluding the same thing: birdwatching is good for mental health and wellbeing.
Physical health benefits too. Regular walking lowers blood pressure and reduces the risk of heart attack and diabetes. It even lowers your risk of dying from any cause. These are substantial health benefits in anyone's language, and the good news is that birdwatching makes you walk.
In pursuit of the elusive noisy scrub-bird, my family once walked 20 kilometres in a single day around remote Cheyne's Beach in Western Australia. When this loud-mouthed heath-dweller evaded detection, we walked a further 18 kilometres in a vain attempt to spot it the next day.
In birding parlance, we dipped on our bogey bird but, in the words of Mr Schwarzenegger: "we'll be back".
So if birdwatching was a pill, your doctor would be prescribing it twice a day, your birding life list would be part of your medical history, and your cardiologist would simultaneously be an ornithologist.
But the dividends of birding extend far beyond the individual.
Bird-based tourism generates hundreds of millions of dollars for the Australian economy, and is particularly important in remote and regional areas.
We saw this first hand at Marks Point. The cafe was full of birders planning their expedition and debriefing.
Bird nerds from as far away as WA had made the dash to this town on Lake Macquarie and they all needed a coffee, lunch and a place to stay.
The bird is the magnet, but it's the locals who benefit.
With all this good news, why am I worried about birding?
Australia's birds are in trouble. Birdlife Australia estimates that one in six bird species is endangered, while the federal government lists 164 species as being threatened.
The federal Environment Minister, Murray Watt, has an opportunity to stop this flight towards extinction as he develops the regulations, known as the standards, which will accompany the recently reformed nature protection laws. These reformed laws have the potential to significantly increase nature protection in this country, but whether they succeed or fail largely depends upon these standards.
We now have a draft nature standard, released for public comment, that is weak and process-driven, meaning that developers can tick a box to satisfy the law rather than committing to protect nature.
What we need is a strong nature standard that forces developers to show that the outcome of their proposal is consistent with the objectives of the laws that are designed to protect nature.
This would help stop one of the main drivers of extinction in Australia, habitat loss through land-clearing and native forest logging. It would ensure that our forests, bush and sky are filled with our feathered friends, giving future generations the chance to spot a Carnaby's cockatoo, a swift parrot, or perhaps even a Cocos booby, and to experience the accompanying scientifically proven joie de vivre.
