What It’s Like Inside the Brain of An Expert Birder

Erik Wing knows well that birding can change the way you think. As a neuroscientist, he’s studied how avian expertise can rewire cognition and boost parts of the memory. As a birder himself, he’s noticed those shifts in his own mind.

In a new study, published last month in the Journal of Neuroscience, Wing and his co-authors revealed that parts of the brains of expert birders are denser than those of novice birders matched in age, gender, and education level. The work even hints that birding may help maintain brain health as we age. 

Audubon asked Wing, who conducted the study during a research fellowship at Baycrest Hospital in Toronto, about these latest findings—and what actually changes in the brains of those who rise before dawn, tromp through swamps and prairies, and pore over subtle field marks to beef up their life lists. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Audubon: You’re a birder yourself, how did you start?

Wing: My mom knows a lot about birds and always tried to get me interested. As kids, my brother and I flatly refused. In my twenties, when I was out hiking a lot anyway, I finally got interested in birds. I was already studying memory and learning in graduate school, and I could feel my brain change as I was learning birds. That led to this line of research. 

Audubon: What kind of brain changes did you sense as you became a better birder?

Wing: I saw how I’d make different mistakes as I was learning. Initially, lots of things get confused, and everything is new. A few months later, you start to differentiate birds that used to confuse you, and you make better mistakes. I was birding with people who knew more than I did, and I noticed my brain changing, very subjectively.

Audubon: Your study asked beginner and expert birders to memorize a bird, then find it in a lineup with three similar species. You used local birds, as well as unfamiliar Old World species. How’d you pick which species to use?

Wing: We wanted birds that were hard for everybody, including experts. The notorious “little brown jobs” were great for this. Experts had to pay extra attention to distinguish Old World flycatchers and larks, but novices found local sparrows and wrens equally hard. This let us compare groups and see how experts responded to easier and harder identifications.

Audubon: You used two types of MRI measures to study brain function in real time and the density of brain structures. What did you learn about how the brains of experts and novices differ?

Wing: In experts, we found changes to structural brain organization in several regions involved in attention and perception. Then we looked at how these regions responded when people memorized and identified birds. Some regions with structural differences also showed higher brain activity when experts viewed unfamiliar birds, which required more attention to subtle patterns. In the novices, we didn’t see this increase. 

Audubon: Your study suggests that gaining expertise in birding “might mitigate age-related decline” in the relevant parts of the brain. What exactly did you find?

Wing: That’s the angle that got the most interest, but it’s also the most tentative. In brain regions supporting expert performance, older birdwatchers continue to have more compact, organized structure than age-matched novices. This suggests changes associated with learning birds, but doesn’t prove a direct causal link. We would want to track a larger group of people longitudinally, over years, to see the trajectory of brain change in individuals and link it to their experiences.

More generally, though, we know that knowledge developed across many years helps protect cognitive function in aging, and this will be important to keep studying in birding.

Audubon: Why is it particularly fruitful to study birders?

Wing: Two people can look at the same bird and have entirely different experiences based on their knowledge. When you’re learning new concepts, there’s a tension between detecting differences and detecting similarities. Learning birds, you have to distinguish similar species but also be flexible enough to recognize the same species across environments or in different plumage. Birding really challenges the mind because of the sheer number of species, the variability by season and location, and the dynamic nature of ID, where you often get only a glimpse. There aren’t many pursuits that combine all these factors.

Audubon: Do you have any advice about birding for brain health?            

Wing: [It’s good] to bird with friends or in groups, in addition to alone, since it’s helpful to hear what other people are paying attention to. And in general, social relationships are one of the most important components of cognitive and brain health in aging. Getting into birds can be a great way to make new friends in a semi-structured way. [Also,] go birding in a variety of locations, even if it’s just different places in the local area, so that your concept of a given species isn’t linked too narrowly to any one environment. It also helps to appreciate subtle regional variation within species. 

Audubon: Did your birding habits change at all after doing this study?

Wing: Ironically, while I was busy with the study I had a lot less time to look at birds in real life. But even just walking around the local park, you realize how much more there is to learn about bird behavior, flight motion, and auditory cues. I tried to attend more to these aspects, which we couldn’t study directly in the MRI, so that we might design future work to see how bird learning incorporates information beyond the static bird pictures we used.