It’s the writer’s life, really. It’s, it’s, umm… any artists’ life is… failing, failing, failing, waiting around, nothing will ever work again. All the interesting birds are gone. Nature’s falling apart. And then, suddenly you’re seeing a Prothonotary Warbler. And all of that is forgotten, and there’s this-this moment when the world’s okay.
-Jonathan Franzen
Birding is a fantastic hobby. In 2016 a US Fish and Wildlife Association survey showed that around 45 million people watched birds in the US alone, and the numbers keep on growing. So, in this post I will begin to address why you should join this huge movement of Bird loving people.
One reason as to why you should bird is that it brings you to places you might never go. Point Pelee, Cape May, Magee Marsh, “Ding” Darling, the Chiricahua mountains, Bosque Del Apache, The Everglades, Point Reyes, The Brownsville Dump, Santa Ana, Big Bend National Park, Acadia National Park. This massive list includes just a fraction of the places that birders flock to (pun totally intended) every year to see the huge number of unique birds.
Another reason to bird are the stories you can tell. Whether you search for a rare crow in a gull infested dump (or vise versa), or you stay in a cramped old army base from WWII with 20 other birders just to see those sweet, sweet, vagrants (a vagrant in birding means a bird that comes from somewhere else, but for one reason or another is in the wrong place) in a terrible blizzard in the middle of the summer, you are bound to have some stories to tell. My personal stories are a bit less crazy than that, but I still love telling people about the time my birding team walked through a tiny town in southern Georgia past midnight looking for owls, and how we heard a Chuck-Wills-Widow (and some apparently nocturnal geese) in a park that was supposed to be closed. It was completely worth it. Even if it was a complete dip (when you don’t see the rarity you hoped for) the stories can make it worth it. My teacher once camped out all night next to what he thought was an elf owl calling in an attempt to see it, and when he woke up at first light to see it, it had just been a Mockingbird, repeating the same call again and again, all night long.
The last reason I will talk about tonight is obviously the birds. In the end of the day, they make all of your birding efforts worth it. Everything from a Northern Cardinal to a Kirtland’s Warbler makes birding worth it. Even sometimes when it I look at an especially shiny Starling or an especially cute House Sparrow (both invasive species that have spread like a wildfire) I will fall in love with birding again for the one millionth time
That’s it for today, I hope your week is a good one, and may your birds be plentiful.
Atlanta birding with P 