The New York Times - The quiet joy of bird-watching

Bird-watching has a way of sneaking up on you. If you’ve found yourself listening to a bird and thinking, “That’s not just a bird! That’s a New World warbler—a Lucy’s warbler!” Well, at some point, you started paying attention. Which is of course all bird-watching really is: paying close attention.

For one strange winter in Hawaii, I was living in a tree with nothing but time. I fed birds from commercial and homemade bird feeders, and climbing down from my tent platform in the mornings, I’d register the small friends in the branches above me.

Down by the beaches at dusk, at one spot in particular, I would watch the ‘ua‘u kani, or wedge-tailed shearwaters, come in from the sea and find their burrow in the sand. Their speed above the sand raises the hair on your neck. It is a feeling of lightness brought on as much by their lines of flight as it is the momentary realization that observing them, in this time, somehow marks your own presence on that beach as all the more alien and bizarre.

Bird-watching is mostly made of these accidental, stolen moments—at least that’s how it feels to me. Maybe this pastime will happen upon you, too. 

Everything you need to start bird-watching from home→

Give your neighborhood birds our best. 

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