What Birding Can Teach Us About Living
After an inspiring pigeon encounter with her son, a mother discovered a new appreciation for birds and the everyday wonders around us.
I started paying attention to birds when my then four-year-old son, Alexander, asked me why the pigeons pecking at crumbs next to us had “that shiny purply blueness” on their necks. He was enchanted. And soon I was, too: by that latticework of iridescent feathers—a 160-million-year-old adaptation, it turns out—and generally by all things pigeon.
Alexander and I tumbled into a pigeon-research vortex. We learned that homing pigeons, known for their outstanding navigation skills, have iron crystals in their beaks that allow them to detect Earth’s magnetic fields. We marveled at—and I envied—pigeons’ egalitarian approach to parenthood: Both males and females produce a nutrient-rich secretion, a “milk” of sorts, to feed their young. About a week into this deep-dive, as I walked to the drugstore, a dark wave of pigeons swooped off a nearby roof and I wondered: How have we normalized these tiny flapping dinosaurs above us? Why aren’t we all walking around with our jaws dropped?
Apparently plenty of people are: Birding is booming. And the hobby’s health benefits are widely recognized. But there are live-a-better-life benefits, too. Habits are contagious, and birding exercises the habit of searching for, and paying close attention to, something beautiful and impermanent.
Habits are contagious, and birding exercises the habit of searching for, and paying close attention to, something beautiful and impermanent.
When we spot a bird—a cardinal, let’s say—we look up from our phones or away from the cacophony of our interior worlds and turn our attention outward. The only thing we “get” from our proximity to the bird is a moment of delight; the cardinal won’t stay for long. The minute spent gazing at the brilliant-red bird is Tolstoy’s “gold in the sand”—a jolt of joy that pierces the mundanity and pain of being alive.
We find what we look for. When we move through our days with a birder’s ethos of searching for beauty in ordinary moments, we notice things we’d otherwise miss. We strengthen our (withering) attention spans and develop eyes and ears attuned to delight.
When I head toward my younger son Charlie’s room to wake him up in the morning and ask myself What joy will I find here?, I do find joy. I spy two new freckles on his nose and give each one a kiss before I register the mountain of unfolded laundry on the chair. As I lift him out of his bed, he wraps his downy arms around my neck and requests a “wake-up lullaby” about Captain Hook.
Zooming out from this moment and looking at it like a birder reminds me of the brevity of this exhausting, tender chapter of my life. A chapter full of menial labor, yes, but also of unselfconscious affection and idiosyncratic turns-of-phrase coined by minds too new and too original to be confined by established norms of how to think and speak. I feel an ache that makes me present, not sad. I say yes to the wake-up lullaby instead of folding the laundry.
I walked by a construction site the other day and paused, taking it in through a birder’s eyes. What beauty will I find here? A backhoe’s giant claw scooped rock and dirt to create a trench, and a crane truck nimbly plopped pipes into it. I asked myself a version of a familiar question: How have we normalized these tiny rivers that defy gravity and whisk clean water up into our apartments? Or that miracle of miracles, the modern sewage system?
Peering at the construction site in the same way I’d peer at a Yellow-rumped Warbler—closely, and long enough to create space for awe to seep in—made me more awake to the loveliness of existence. I continued on my walk lighter, my usual company of anxious ruminations quieter.
Like every other New Yorker, Alexander and I were besotted with the late, great Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle-Owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo. Last February, Alexander printed out 17 pictures of Flaco perched next to a dead rat for each of his preschool classmates to take home. (I apologized to their parents but regretted nothing.) As we discussed Flaco’s untimely death, Alexander told me that he’ll never stop looking for “real live owls.” My deepest hope is that he discovers that the magic of birding is the exact same magic of living a good life. That he learns to look at people, at everything, the way he looks at an owl, or at a crusty old pigeon with a purply-blue neck: with loving attention, and with the awareness that flickers of wonder are all around him, if he keeps his eyes open enough to see them.