Why I Watch Birds

I’m not an expert.  I watch birds because they give me joy, not because I want to evaluate primary projection of feathers or debate whether keeping a hummingbird feeder up late into fall causes hummingbirds to stop migrating.  I watch for purely selfish reasons:

1. I’m easily amused.  Birds’ lives are much more interesting than mine.

2. Good clean fun.  I feel better about myself after watching birds for an hour than after watching an episode of “Finding Bigfoot”.

3. Discovery.  Did you know birds can sleep while they fly?  One side of their brain sleeps while the other stays awake.  I can’t do that.  We are learning more about birds every day.  The more I learn the more I realize I don’t know.

4. Availability.  Birds are everywhere.  If you look outside you might just see a bird.  And bird watching is easier than polar bear watching.

5. Be a voyeur without being judged.  Try watching people eat, sleep, have sex, and poop through a pair of binoculars and see how that goes.  Not very well.  Birds don’t care if you watch them as long as you give them space.

6. Connection to a larger community.  Stand at the edge of the first open water you find in March looking at ducks through a pair of binoculars, and sure enough you’re going to get company.  “Whatta ya got?” is a standard greeting in the birding world.  You have an immediate connection.

7. It takes me out of my own head.  Bird watching is better therapy than therapy.  It’s better than a bowl of ice cream with raspberries and chocolate sauce (although I’ve been known to multi-task - the two aren’t mutually exclusive).

8. An inflated sense of self-importance.  There are so many opportunities to contribute to citizen science with birding.  Your information goes a long way to showing the big picture of bird populations, migration patterns, and other bird-nerdy  data.  You can  participate in eBird, Feeder Watch, the Great Backyard Bird Count, the Christmas Bird Count. Your information counts and therefore you count.

9. Umm, have you seen a bird?  They are gorgeous.  If you can’t plant flowers, put up a bird feeder and you’ll have flying flowers year round.  If you can at all afford binoculars ( or beg, steal, or borrow some - maybe just borrow) look at a Common Raven through them.  Those suckers can be iridescent, multifaceted, and drop-dead gorgeous.  

I could go on but I don’t want to lose my last remaining reader.  So you, hey you out there, you one last person!  Shut your computer down.  Look outside.  Find a bird, and watch it.  You may fall in love.