It's easy to think of birding as an escape from reality. Instead, I see it as immersion in the true reality. I don't need to know who the main characters are on social media and what everyone is saying about them, when I can instead spend an hour trying to find a rare sparrow.
I have been fascinated by the animal kingdom for as long as I've been fascinated by anything. As a child, I visited zoos and mainlined nature documentaries. As an adult, I built a career on writing about the natural world. But for most of that time, I was oblivious to the wild creatures that were all around me. Animals were a source of intellectual delight — never far from my thoughts, but never truly part of my daily life. Then, last year, I became a birder. The shift happened slowly at first: I'd simply take my new pair of binoculars with me on hikes to snatch quick glances at birds on the way. But these opportunistic trips soon morphed into dedicated ones. I started going out with the sole and specific purpose of watching birds. I found myself poring over field guides, joining group chats in which birders alert each other to the presence of rare birds, walking through pitch-black forests to listen for owls, and racking up a long life list of species. This all sounds rather extra, and birding is often defined by its excesses. But as I write in a guest essay for Times Opinion, it has also profoundly improved my mental health. It has tripled the time I spend outdoors, and proven more meditative than meditation. While I'm birding, my senses, plural, focus resolutely on the present, and the usual hubbub in my head becomes quiet. Birding has also reshaped and deepened my connection to the natural world. Creatures that I've only ever written about I've now seen in person. Countless fragments of unrooted trivia that rattled around my brain are now grounded in place, time and personal experience. As I write in the essay, when I started birding, I remember thinking that I'd never see most of the species in my field guide. Sure, backyard birds like robins and Western bluebirds would be easy, but not black skimmers, peregrine falcons or loggerhead shrikes. I had internalized the idea of nature as distant and remote — the province of nature documentaries and far-flung vacations. But in the last six months, I've seen soaring golden eagles, heard duetting great horned owls, watched dancing sandhill cranes, and marveled at diving loons, all within an hour of my house. "I'll never see that" has turned into "Where can I find that?" And I hope everyone who reads the essay starts pondering the same.
Here's what we're focusing on today:
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