8 reasons why it’s time to become a birdwatcher

May 2020.

Early pandemic.

Screechy zoom call in my kid’s bedroom.

My eyes gaze out the window.

I see a robin on a wire.

Wait.

Is that a robin?

The call ends and I run to the basement.

I pull open a bin in the storage room and find binoculars.

I run up and hold them up to my eyes.

I twiddle the dial and it suddenly pops—

I was blown away!

What was this bird?

Wait, what was that app Alec was telling me about last week after tennis?

The one where he clicked some buttons—

—and told us the little bird playing in the dirt outside the tennis courts was a ... House Finch?

Oh, right!

I remembered Alec's line.

“It’s the name of a wizard … and the name of a bird.”

Merlin!

I opened the App Store and typed in “merlin” and ​downloaded it​.

I clicked some buttons—

And found out the bird out my window was a ... ​Rose-breasted Grosbeak​!

I had never seen one before!

I looked out the window again and now there were two.

Maybe three?

Next week we ordered and set up a trampoline in our backyard.

The ​Rose-breasted Grosbeaks​ hung out on the wires above my kids jumping up and down for a few days.

I downloaded the sister app ​eBird​ and made a free account to start tracking the birds I saw.

And now I've been tracking for five years!

Today I tell you very honestly:

Becoming a birder was one of the best things I have ever done.

It has fundamentally changed my life.

I feel happier! I’m a better listener. Outside more. Moving more. Less screens. More patience.

I feel like a better dad, husband, son … and self.

Today I'm 45.

Started birding when I was 40.

If I knew how big a difference it would make I would have started sooner!

I think for years I just needed a nudge.

So for the younger me, for anybody out there who needs a nudge, I am here today to tell you it is absolutely, definitely, a million percent time for you to become a birder.

Here are 8 reasons why:

1. It’s good for your body

Does your back hurt? Neck sore? Mine, too. Curling our bowling ball heads around tinier screens—squinting our eyes, squeezing our spines. Uhhh. Talked to a chiro or physio lately? Business is booming! Screen use has skyrocketed. And sitting. So much sitting! Been a decade since we declared “​sitting is the new smoking​” and yet … here we are, ​still sitting​. Desks, planes, couches—just look around. Everyone's sitting! Well, birding shakes up our sedentary lifestyle and acts as a slow and natural physiological readjustment against these forces. Birding helps us look straight again ... and then up ... and then deep. We widen our aperture staring into forest canopies instead of squinting into tiny techy watches. And let's not forget ​Dr. Qing Li’s​ incredible ​research​ on 森林浴—aka “shinrin-yoku,” aka “forest bathing”—which shows trees release ​phytoncides​ which naturally reduce blood pressure, reduce blood sugar, reduce cortisol, reduce adrenaline, and increase production of NK (“anti-cancer”) white blood cells. Birding is good on the body.

2. It’s good for your mind

​Jonathan Haidt​, author of ‘​The Anxious Generation​’ (​04/2024)​, has shown ​TikTok’s own internal strategy​ is to ensnare younger and younger people into its addictive forever-loops. He quotes internal documents that report using social media platforms creates “a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.” We know we have a problem! That’s why there’s a siren call globally right now to get ​screens out of schools​. Maybe it goes back to ​Jiddu Krishnamurti​ (1895-1986) warning us that computers may lead our brains to be “thoroughly employed in amusement ... in entertainment” or ​Neil Postman​ (1931-2003) writing in ‘​Amusing Ourselves To Death​’ that “People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” To our endless scrolls and fracturing focus birding offers a vital prescription. Do you remember waiting? Like … just waiting. For 10 seconds. Without grabbing your phone. Birding grows that muscle. And when you nurture it back it feels good, so mentally soothing, that you’ll soon start waiting, looking at a tree or pond or sky, for … 20 seconds? 30? And how about listening. Really listening. Not to headphones but to true three-dimensional deep, rich, luxurious listening to the earth type listening? I forgot I ever did that! Birding grows back that muscle. Hearing birds and insects and water and trees—mmmmmm. It's medicine I didn't even know I needed. Plus, I’ll add these days just the practice of looking at birds—instead of billionaires, influencers, or politicians—is activism. A way to straw-puncture the algorithmically-enhanced plasti-wrap slowly suffocating us and then frantically rip it off to stand up briefly outside the matrix. I met a photographer at the ​Warbler Woods Bird Sanctuary​ in San Antonio last year and he was calmly, serenely, sitting beside a pond … all day. He had his camera and told me the ​MacGillivray’s Warbler​ came to feed every hour or so. He struck me as some kind of enlightened Buddha. Calm, patient, tranquil. I may never get there! But birding nudges us that way.

3. It’s easier than ever

You know how ​John James Audubon​ (1785-1851) used to bird? With a gun. Birds were too far, too fast, too flitty to see in detail. And binoculars weren’t invented until after he died! So he shot them, then studied them, then painted them. His giant painted ‘plates’ served as something like a precursor to Field Guides:

But today? Skip the gun! You don’t technically need anything but it helps to grab binoculars (I recommend ​Nikon Monarch 8x42s​), any local field guide (‘​Birds of Ontario​’ is my best local and ​Sibley's Guides​ are always great ... plus ​J. Drew Lanham​ reminds us used ones from thrift shops are fine!) and, of course, to download the aforementioned totally free and (generously) ad- and sponsor-free apps ​Merlin ID​ and ​eBird​. They’re run by Cornell University (props to ​Cornell​!) and so easy to use. The Merlin app’s newer “Sound ID” feature is often called ‘​Shazam for Birds​’ because you simply press a button and it immediately tells you what birds you can hear right where you’re standing! Like I was standing in Houston last month and pressed this and got this—

I will add that the SoundID is equally helpful at not-clocking those sounds you always thought were birds but maybe aren't. Toads, frogs, bats, raccoons? Been there! Many times. And SoundID is on top of the aforepictured “Bird ID”—that size-and-color feature that helped me ID the Rose-breasted Grosbeak. (Which, btw, is definitely my ‘spark bird,’ a term loosely defined as ‘the bird that gets you into birding.’) eBird also keeps helpful records of every bird you see and acts like the best social media network ever—donation-based with no ulterior motives!—to help you (for example) find the ​Top 100 birders in your hometown​ (congrats ​Alec​—#96!) or the ​Top 100 birders in the world​ (I picture #1 Peter, #2 Steve, and #3 Jürgen as some kinda alterna-​Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson​) and then you can just click people’s names to follow, connect, or reach out to see if they're up for birding. I have met many friends this way! But more on that later.

4. It makes you less speciesist

When I was little I’d heard of sexist (discriminating based on sex) and I’d heard of racist (people yelling “Paki!” at me across the two-lane highway up north when I was visiting my cousin Manju) but I hadn’t yet heard of ageist (discriminating based on age) or ableist (discriminating on ability). And, you know, I’ve been ageist, I’ve been ableist. That’s … sort of how you learn them—through an experience that helps illuminate your own behavior. We’re blind to so much. So much! And to that end birding has helped me become less speciesist. The more time I spend with birds the more I see them as just another creature we share the planet with. We talk, sing, shiver, mate. We nest. We raise young. We hunt for food. They’re just like us. Just trying to make it work, trying to make it alllll work. And you know what? They have! We’ve been here (generously) ​3 million years​. Flying dinosaurs arrived 150 million years ago—but birds? If we want to go by modern definitions? 60 million. Still, that's 20 times longer than us! We were living in trees 3 million years ago. 60 million years ago we ​looked like tree shrews​! So when we see us, our species, prioritizing our quality of life in exchange for absolutely decimating theirs? It hurts. It can’t not hurt. You see the newspaper articles with new proposed megahighways and mourn the swallows who'll need to fly deeper into the night for fewer and fewer insects over fewer and fewer ponds. Or the ​Bobolink​ or ​Eastern Meadowlark​ who are losing their grassland homes as we pave paradise to put up parking lots. (“​They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum, And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them.​”)

Bobolink via ​Birdfact​

Birding inches us closer to the health of the planet. Deep forest breaths or misty mornings on a beach at sunrise. You feel it. Maybe you pick up a bit more litter. Maybe you plant a tree. Maybe you team up with a group of locals to return a fallen juvenile ​Barred Owl​ to its nest high into the trees (as I watched an Audubon Group at ​Mead Botanical Gardens​ do last month). WHO KNOWS WHAT YOU’LL DO! Nobody knows. I feel birding dialing up my admittedly-abysmally-low natural observation, preservation, and kindness towards nature. A wonderful positive externality.

5. Birding minimizes your ego

Related to the above: Birds help reduce our problems to just human. You just think of yourself as less important. In a good way! Say I walk around a park with a pair of binoculars—stepping away from screaming playgrounds and birthday parties with balloons and plastic cups—and, you know, I see … nothing at first. Nothing at first is normal! Then ... I see trees. Then I walk to the trees. Stare into the canopy. Wait a minute. It is hard to wait a minute! But I work on the muscle of waiting a minute. Then an ​American Robin​ flies by—as they’ve been doing for ​hundreds of thousands of years​ before ​we began accidentally started calling them that​—

and that pulls me briefly away from the birthday, from noise, from time. I remember my problems … are species problems. And the wider world has lots of species. This widened outlook has resulted in me becoming more passionate about topics like climate change, ecological health, and conservationism. I’m no pro! Not even close! But I am learning from people like ​J. Drew Lanham​, ​Jonathan Franzen​, and my 92-year-old grandmother-in-law Joan who looks up and writes down notes on every new flower, tree, and bird she sees. By date! In pen! Right in the book! I have been rewarded and enriched by books I would have never heard of nevermind tried to read—like ‘Birds Art Life’ by Kyo MacClear (​3/2019​), ‘My Side of the Mountain’ by Jean Craighead George (​9/2022​), ‘A Sand County Almanac’ by Aldo Leopold (​7/2023​), ‘Reason In A Dark Time’ by Dale Jamieson (​2/2024​), ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan Weisman (​7/2024​), ‘H is for Hawk’ by Helen Macdonald (​2/2025​), or ‘What an Owl Knows’ by Jennifer Ackerman (​3/2025​). Each helps me be a bit less ‘me’—bit more we, bit more us, bit more this. I feel a slight nudge out of the day as my mind explores places a little more ... zoomed out. With distance. With perspective. Bit more wise. Bit more grateful. It's fun gaining a more and more, yes, bird's-eye view. Because then you're suddenly exploring the world from the perspective of birds. And then, on some lucky days, from the forest, from the sun, from the stars.

6. You can do it anywhere

Bird from your couch during commercials in the ​ballgame​. Bird on your walk to school. Bird from the subway to your apartment. From the driveway to the front door. Bird on hills, beaches, mountains, trails. On any work trip? Bird! Any holiday? Bird! Tell you what: Go anywhere on the planet, go to the most remote place you can possibly imagine, and when you arrive ... for sure ... there will be birds. Maybe ​Ivory Gulls​ or ​King Penguins​! But they’ll be there. They’ll be everywhere!

7. It scratches deep list-making tendencies

I have ADHD as do many members of my family, extended family, and friends. Hello! We are welcome here. In fact, birding was almost kind of … made for us? New research suggests ADHD should really be renamed VAST—Variable Attention Stimulus Trait—as neither D in the old definition is correct. We don’t have attention deficit—but rather variable attention. (Some ADHD pals like ​Dan Kwan​ or ​Penn Holderness​ are best hyper-focusers I know!) Birding lends itself to attention oscillation—step-by-step, on an empty beach, following shorebird tracks, waiting for a leaf to rustle, spying a flash of color. That’s superfocus. And, back to the bad definition, we also don’t have “hyperactivity disorder” but, rather, a “stimulus trait”—meaning we require more stimulation. Like our tongues might taste lemon juice as less lemony-sour so we need more lemon juice to taste it as much. You know what’s stimulating? Birds! So birding is incredibly stimulating. Keeping a list, counting species, checking field marks, making notes. “I see something,” somebody will say, and then you both flick your binoculars into the canopy. “Brown cap, streaky yellow breast, bouncing tail.” Somebody will think. Another might fire up Merlin or Sound ID. And then someone says: “Palm Warbler?”

Have you seen a ​Palm Warbler​ before? If not: Lifer! Meaning first time you’ve seen it in your life. New bird to on your life list! There are ​11,086​ bird species in the world and the very top birder has … ​9948​. So you’ll be going a while! (Of course you can simultaneously keep—and the eBird app does this automatically and for free and without ads!—a city / county list, a state / province list, and a country list. Like last week I was in San Antonio and I saw a ​Barred Owl​ in a tree and then a ​Black-bellied Whistling-Duck​ with its young. Here are the pictures I took:

Neither bird was new to me on my Life List but they were both new on my “Texas” list which ticked up to 97.

A couple weeks earlier I was in Dallas and on a late night walk I saw my first ever ​Painted Bunting​ for a few seconds and got a very bad and very blurry picture ... but enough to be sure what it was:

That one was new to me anywhere so my “World Life” list ticked up to 629 that day.

It’s fun! So much fun. Birding deep-scratches your list-making tendencies. I've heard many people say it's like Pokémon GO … but for real.

8. You join a community of bright, eccentric weirdos

Like me. And you. Like us. Look at us! You are 2580 words into an article on birding. Is that normal? Screw normal! “It’s weird not to be weird,” said John Lennon. I agree! These days the pressure to homogenize is stronnnnng. Bright, eccentric weirdos—that’s our jam. As my therapist Gary told me years ago after my divorce when I was struggling to get back out there: “You meet interesting people in interesting places.” Amen! Boggy forests, distant ponds, brambly trails? Pretty interesting! Way off the Tinder circuit. When I’m visiting a city and am keen to slip in a couple hours of birding I google “cityname top 100 ebird”. So if I’m heading to Nashville I type “nashville top 100 ebird” and—

—click the names of people who have set up eBird profiles and email a few people. That’s how I met Graham who picked me up from my hotel before sunrise to go owling (we came up empty but it was fun) and helped me see my first-ever ​Eastern Bluebirds​ and ​Fish Crows​ (like American Crows but with a ​delightfully raspy call)​.

That’s how I met the incredible JC in Jacksonville, the 76-year-old retired Navy Captain who picked me up a big truck and said with a big smile “We’re live free or die people!” We saw 59 species of birds that day including my first ​Boat-tailed Grackles​, ​Sandwich Terns​, and ​Roseate Spoonbills​. JC and I have kept in touch, traded photos, and he helps me ID toughies over text. Check out his ​stunning pictures​! Birding is how I met ​Nick Sweetman​, the graffiti artist who beautifies bridge underpasses with Hooded Mergansers and who I partnered with to turn a 750-square foot wall of brutalist concrete behind a tired subway station into a bright ​painted aviary of local birds​. (Check out our documentary ​here​!)

Birders are people like ​Alie Ward ​(check out her Ologies episodes on ​Pigeons​, ​Crows​, ​and more​), ​J. Drew Lanham​ (the McArthur ‘Genius’ who wrote ‘​Sparrow Envy,​’ ​the astounding Audubon cover feature on ol’ JJ​, and created the YT video “​Rules for the Black Birdwatcher​”), and ​Jonathan Franzen​ (check his National Geographic cover story ‘​Why Birds Matter​’). You can find bird community through places like the ​/birding subreddit​, Facebook’s ‘​What’s This Bird?​’ or ‘​Redpolling​’ pages, or by joining your ​local birding club​. You might start playing ​Wingspan​ or falling into ​Maria Popova's​ astounding and mesmerizing ​bird cards​. I’m saying if you’re a bit odd like us you’ll fit right in! And we’ll be glad to have you. We welcome all people, all types, all spectrums, all abilities. We want you in our world and you are welcome here.

Now!

Okay!

We’re at the end!

You made it through 8 reasons to get into birdwatching.

I could honestly write another 8 … I barely talked about photography or art or the sheer joy of flipping over a triplicate bird calendar on the first day of the new month:

But I won’t!

Instead I will close with just one small point.

I would like to remind you that you already … watch birds.

You do!

Do you not?

Do you not see birds?

Do you not, sometimes, watch them?

You do.

You already are a birdwatcher, technically.

Only thing missing is calling yourself that.

The identity part.

As James Clear writes in ‘​Atomic Habits​,’ “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”

Who do you want to be?

I say it’s time to get over any hesitations!

Skeptical of wearing wide-brimmed tan hats?

Any hat or no hat is fine!

Not sure about the camo or tan pants with 12 pockets?

Any pants or no pants are fine!

I’m here today to tell you that the acceptance, the lean-in, the self-identity?

It is already in you.

Search your feelings.

You know it’s true.

It is time.

It is … your destiny.

Because when you finally see and feel and accept the fact that you are a birder—

—oh it feels so good.

It feels so, so good.

So thank you for reading.

And I'll see you out there.

Oh, and of course, I wish you

Good birding.

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Want more inspiration to begin? J. Drew Lanham's poem “​Sparrow Envy​” will pull you outside.

I don't just write about birds ... I also ​talk about them​!

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Why Birds Matter by Jonathan Franzen

Hey everyone,

I am often asked to explain my love of birds. “What?”, friends say, “you get up at the crack of down and slap on cargo points and a Tilley to futz around in the forest looking for sparrows?” I will say I know it sounds odd. But it’s become such a sacred ​commune with nature​, with life, with the natural world. And, like ​my Rock Clock​, it’s a wonderful zoom out, too.

One of the biggest things that got me into birding was the January, 2018 cover story ​“Why Birds Matter” by Jonathan Franzen​. I have read it many times and it continues to deeply resonate. Franzen has a way of thinking around things that I find entrancing. My conversation with him on 3 Books only deepened my respect for him and how he approaches the world.

Hope you like it,

Neil

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Why Birds Matter

By Jonathan Franzen | Read ​here on National Geographic​

For most of my life, I didn’t pay attention to birds. Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling and who hurries out to see a golden plover that’s been reported in the neighborhood, just because it’s a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska. When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain why I love my brothers. And yet the question is a fair one, worth considering in the centennial year of America’s ​Migratory Bird Treaty Act​: Why do birds matter?

My answer might begin with the vast scale of the avian domain. If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world. Things with feathers can be found in every corner of every ocean and in land habitats so bleak that they’re habitats for nothing else. Gray gulls raise their chicks in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth.

Emperor penguins incubate their eggs in Antarctica in winter. Goshawks nest in the Berlin cemetery where Marlene Dietrich is buried, sparrows in Manhattan traffic lights, swifts in sea caves, vultures on Himalayan cliffs, chaffinches in Chernobyl. The only forms of life more widely distributed than birds are microscopic.

To survive in so many different habitats, the world’s 10,000 or so bird species have evolved into a spectacular diversity of forms. They range in size from the ostrich, which can reach nine feet in height and is widespread in Africa, to the aptly named bee hummingbird, found only in Cuba. Their bills can be massive (pelicans, toucans), tiny (weebills), or as long as the rest of their body (sword-billed hummingbirds). Some birds—the painted bunting in Texas, Gould’s sunbird in South Asia, the rainbow lorikeet in Australia—are gaudier than any flower. Others come in one of the nearly infinite shades of brown that tax the vocabulary of avian taxonomists: rufous, fulvous, ferruginous, bran-colored, foxy.

Birds are no less diverse behaviorally. Some are highly social, others anti. African queleas and flamingos gather in flocks of millions, and parakeets build whole parakeet cities out of sticks. Dippers walk alone and underwater, on the beds of mountain streams, and a wandering albatross may glide on its 10-foot wingspan 500 miles away from any other albatrosses. I’ve met friendly birds, like the New Zealand fantail that once followed me down a trail, and I’ve met mean ones, like the caracara in Chile that swooped down and tried to knock my head off when I stared at it too long. Roadrunners kill rattlesnakes for food by teaming up on them, one bird distracting the snake while another sneaks up behind it. Bee-eaters eat bees. Leaftossers toss leaves. Thick-billed murres can dive underwater to a depth of 700 feet, peregrine falcons downward through the air at 240 miles an hour. A wren-like rushbird can spend its entire life beside one half-acre pond, while a cerulean warbler may migrate to Peru and then find its way back to the tree in New Jersey where it nested the year before.

Birds aren’t furry and cuddly, but in many respects they’re more similar to us than other mammals are. They build intricate homes and raise families in them. They take long winter vacations in warm places. Cockatoos are shrewd thinkers, solving puzzles that would challenge a chimpanzee, and crows like to play. (On days so windy that more practical birds stay grounded, I’ve seen crows launching themselves off hillsides and doing aerial somersaults, just for the fun of it, and I keep returning to the YouTube video of a crow in Russia sledding down a snowy roof on a plastic lid, flying back up with the lid in its beak, and sledding down again.) And then there are the songs with which birds, like us, fill the world. Nightingales trill in the suburbs of Europe, thrushes in downtown Quito, hwameis in Chengdu. Chickadees have a complex language for communicating—not only to each other but to every bird in their neighborhood—about how safe or unsafe they feel from predators. Some lyrebirds in eastern Australia sing a tune their ancestors may have learned from a settler’s flute nearly a century ago. If you shoot too many pictures of a lyrebird, it will add the sound of your camera to its repertoire.

But birds also do the thing we all wish we could do but can’t, except in dreams: They fly. Eagles effortlessly ride thermals; hummingbirds pause in midair; quail burst into flight heart-stoppingly. Taken all together, the flight paths of birds bind the planet together like 100 billion filaments, tree to tree and continent to continent. There was never a time when the world seemed large to them. After breeding, a European swift will stay aloft for nearly a year, flying to sub-Saharan Africa and back, eating and molting and sleeping on the wing, without landing once. Young albatrosses spend as many as 10 years roving the open ocean before they first return to land to breed. A bar-tailed godwit has been tracked flying nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand, 7,264 miles in nine days, while a ruby-throated hummingbird may burn up a third of its tiny body weight to cross the Gulf of Mexico. The red knot, a small shorebird species, makes annual round-trips between Tierra del Fuego and the Canadian Arctic; one long-lived individual, named B95 for the tag on its leg, has flown more miles than separate the Earth and the moon.

There is, however, one critical ability that human beings have and birds do not: mastery of their environment. Birds can’t protect wetlands, can’t manage a fishery, can’t air-condition their nests. They have only the instincts and the physical abilities that evolution has bequeathed to them. These have served them well for a very long time, 150 million years longer than human beings have been around. But now human beings are changing the planet—its surface, its climate, its oceans—too quickly for birds to adapt to by evolving. Crows and gulls may thrive at our garbage dumps, blackbirds and cowbirds at our feedlots, robins and bulbuls in our city parks. But the future of most bird species depends on our commitment to preserving them. Are they valuable enough for us to make the effort?

Value, in the late Anthropocene, has come almost exclusively to mean economic value, utility to human beings. And certainly many wild birds are usefully edible. Some of them in turn eat noxious insects and rodents. Many others perform vital roles—pollinating plants, spreading seeds, serving as food for mammalian predators—in ecosystems whose continuing wildness has touristic or carbon-sequestering value. You may also hear it argued that bird populations function, like the proverbial coal-mine canary, as important indicators of ecological health. But do we really need the absence of birds to tell us when a marsh is severely polluted, a forest slashed and burned, or a fishery destroyed? The sad fact is that wild birds, in themselves, will never pull their weight in the human economy. They want to eat our blueberries.

What bird populations do usefully indicate is the health of our ethical values. One reason that wild birds matter—ought to matter—is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They’re the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it. They share descent with the largest animals ever to walk on land: The house finch outside your window is a tiny and beautifully adapted living dinosaur. A duck on your local pond looks and sounds very much like a duck 20 million years ago, in the Miocene epoch, when birds ruled the planet. In an ever more artificial world, where featherless drones fill the air and Angry Birds can be simulated on our phones, we may see no reasonable need to cherish and support the former rulers of the natural realm. But is economic calculation our highest standard? After Shakespeare’s King Lear steps down from the throne, he pleads with his elder two daughters to grant him some vestige of his former majesty. When the daughters reply that they don’t see the need for it, the old king bursts out: “O, reason not the need!” To consign birds to oblivion is to forget what we’re the children of.

A person who says, “It’s too bad about the birds, but human beings come first” is making one of two implicit claims. The person may mean that human beings are no better than any other animal—that our fundamentally selfish selves, which are motivated by selfish genes, will always do whatever it takes to replicate our genes and maximize our pleasure, the nonhuman world be damned. This is the view of cynical realists, to whom a concern for other species is merely an annoying form of sentimentality. It’s a view that can’t be disproved, and it’s available to anyone who doesn’t mind admitting that he or she is hopelessly selfish. But “human beings come first” may also have the opposite meaning: that our species is uniquely worthy of monopolizing the world’s resources because we are not like other animals, because we have consciousness and free will, the capacity to remember our pasts and shape our futures. This opposing view can be found among both religious believers and secular humanists, and it too is neither provably true nor provably false. But it does raise the question: If we’re incomparably more worthy than other animals, shouldn’t our ability to discern right from wrong, and to knowingly sacrifice some small fraction of our convenience for a larger good, make us more susceptible to the claims of nature, rather than less? Doesn’t a unique ability carry with it a unique responsibility?

A few years ago in a forest in northeast India, I heard and then began to feel, in my chest, a deep rhythmic whooshing. It sounded meteorological, but it was the wingbeats of a pair of great hornbills flying in to land in a fruiting tree. They had massive yellow bills and hefty white thighs; they looked like a cross between a toucan and a giant panda. As they clambered around in the tree, placidly eating fruit, I found myself crying out with the rarest of all emotions: pure joy. It had nothing to do with what I wanted or what I possessed. It was the sheer gorgeous fact of the great hornbill, which couldn’t have cared less about me.

The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. They’re the other world-dominating animals that evolution has produced, and their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we’re not the measure of all things. The stories we tell about the past and imagine for the future are mental constructions that birds can do without. Birds live squarely in the present. And at present, although our cats and our windows and our pesticides kill billions of them every year, and although some species, particularly on oceanic islands, have been lost forever, their world is still very much alive. In every corner of the globe, in nests as small as walnuts or as large as haystacks, chicks are pecking through their shells and into the light.

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If you enjoyed this article, don’t miss Jonathan on Chapter 137 of 3 Books.

And if he didn’t manage to convince you, here are 8 reasons why it’s time to become a birdwatcher.

Sparrow Envy - A Poem by J. Drew Lanham

Hey everyone, 

In my April 2023 Book Club, I wrote about the mesmerizing experience of reading J. Drew Lanham’s phenomenal memoir The Home Place: Memoir of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. I’ve since fallen into a book of poetry he wrote. A lot of which is about birds! Check out the “title track” from his book Sparrow Envy. I love the poems about swan dreams and nighttime migrations, too … but see if these few words on 'sparrow envy' resonate with you today. 

Neil

Sparrow Envy from 'Sparrow Envy'

Written by J. Drew Lanham | Full book here

Were I the sparrow
brown-backed skittish and small—
I would find haven
in thorniest thickets—
search far and wide for fields lain fallow
treasure the unkempt
worship the unmown
covet the weed-strewn row

I would slink
between sedges 
chip unseen from brambles
skulk deep within hedges
and desire the ditches grown wild

I would find great joy
in the mist-sodden morning
sing humble pleas
from the highest weeds
and plead
for the gray days to stay