Turning to Birds

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Introduction: In the Beginning

We all know what a bird is. They live in our yards, in our cities, on our seas. They exist on every single continent. They are the subject of children’s books and books for grown-ups. They are depicted in visual art, in television documentaries, in movies. They have been around for more than 145 million years. One of the earliest cave paintings was of a bird. We use them as symbols and metaphors. We even eat them.

But most people don’t really know birds—or rather, they aren’t aware of them. I used to be one of those people. I knew birds existed. I thought about them, maybe even more than the average person. But I didn’t know them.

There’s a term in the birding world for the bird who brings one into the world of birding. That term is spark bird. And I don’t have one. I wish I did. I get asked the question all the time, and it’s one of those answers that could be perfect for an interview: clean, concise, and easy. But my memory dims when I try to recall which bird first opened my heart and mind to all birds. Class Aves, phylum Chordata, belonging to the kingdom Animalia, categorized under Reptilia (but because their blood is warm, they are not reptiles). Birds are technically flying dinosaurs. And I love them.

I started to sense birds in a deeper way about fifteen years ago, when I took an emotional sabbatical from my work as an actor. I’d been going from project to project without a break and felt depleted, so I retreated to my house in Upstate New York, about two hours from New York City. The house sits on one hundred acres of working farmland. When I bought the property, I signed an agricultural conservation easement with Scenic Hudson, the environmental organization dedicated to safeguarding the Hudson Valley’s landscapes—including the region’s farmland. It’s a way of ensuring that farmland will be kept open and available for agricultural use. There are several agricultural easements in the surrounding area, with a local farmer, Kenny Migliorelli, farming on most of them. I’ve become friends with Kenny and learned how stressful it is to be a farmer. There is so little in his control, and it changes day to day. Small farmers are probably closer than most people to the very essence of life.

During the time of my sabbatical, Kenny was letting the fields go fallow, meaning he wasn’t cultivating a crop but instead putting in plants that would restore the soil. For the first time since I’d bought the home, there were no big crop-tending or harvesting machines or trucks coming through the property.

And there, in the stillness, I started to hear birds. It was as if I’d switched my audio input from one dimension to Dolby stereo. Birds’ sounds began to differentiate themselves from one another. They were no longer generic tweets or chirps but specific sounds, with meaning. There were things going on out in the yard: stories, drama, mating, fighting, death. During that time of personal quiet, I entered a world of sound outside myself—and I’ve never left.

Now, it’s not that my hearing is better than it was; it’s that my perception of the world is wider and deeper. This new awareness of the sounds of birds drew me into a parallel universe, one of constant change and movement, full of life and the will to survive. Wherever I am, whenever I listen, I can tap into that profound energy of survival and draw power from it.

Tapping into that power was what gave me the oomph I needed to return to the city from my sabbatical. As I settled back into my life in Brooklyn, I knew that what I’d found on the farm I could find anywhere. It was simply up to me to seek it out.

During the early days of the pandemic, when everything stopped, I was reminded of that period of quiet—only this time, everyone around me was also experiencing the solitude and silence that I had discovered a dozen years earlier. I heard people talk about looking out their windows as if for the first time and noticing creatures with wings out there. Friends reached out to say that they’d thought of me because they recalled that I liked birds, and they wanted to tell me, “I like them too!” Birds became a news story, a topic of discussion in articles and on podcasts.

The comment that “birds are having a moment” is now something I hear frequently in the birding community. I serve on the boards of two birding organizations, the National Audubon Society and the NYC Bird Alliance, where there’s a new urgency to capitalize on this enthusiasm. We no longer have to spend our energy or resources convincing people that birds are great and can instead find ways we can all work together to protect birds and the places they inhabit.

I’m not surprised that birds are finally having a moment. I’ve long had a sense that people feel a connection to birds, even if they don’t know it. I never thought I’d find a theory to back up this intuition, but I did, in a concept called biophilia. Developed by E. O. Wilson, the eminent biologist best known for his groundbreaking work on ants, the biophilia hypothesis asserts that humans are genetically predisposed to be attracted to nature. According to Wilson, a love for the natural world—and the search for a means to fulfill it—is as basic and instinctual as our needs for food, water, touch, and community.

There is growing scientific evidence supporting the idea that the natural world has an effect on us at once positive, concrete, and profound. A recent study published in the journal Emotion examined something called an “awe walk,” a stroll during which you intentionally shift your attention outward instead of inward. The article’s title reflects this practice’s results: “Big Smile, Small Self: Awe Walks Promote Prosocial Positive Emotions in Older Adults.” The lead author of the study, neurologist Virginia Sturm, has since commented, “I find it remarkable that the simplest intervention in the world—just a three-minute conversation at the beginning of the study suggesting that participants practice feeling awe on their weekly walks—was able to drive significant shifts in their daily emotional experience. . . . This suggests promoting the experience of awe could be an extremely low-cost tool for improving the emotional health of older adults through a simple shift in mindset.”

I’ve been taking “awe walks” for years, except I call it “birding.” So it’s possible for me to experience awe every day. All I have to do is remind myself to lift my eyes from the ground and look around me. If I do so, I will find a bird. That’s a fact, no matter where I am. I might be on a concrete sidewalk in Manhattan and my eyes will land on a pigeon, and even that pigeon will help me “intentionally shift my attention outward instead of inward.” Pigeons are much more interesting than we give them credit for. Stop and observe a pigeon for more than three minutes, and you’ll find a story. Here is one I witnessed the other day.

A male pigeon was circling a female pigeon. How did I know it was a male? Do male pigeons look different from females? No, you can’t tell them apart based on their plumage or other physical characteristics. But as is the case with most bird species, the male pigeon must convince the female that his genetics are better than those of the other male pigeons pecking at the ground nearby. So this male pigeon puffed his neck feathers out, bobbed his head up and down, and cooed. Then he flew up into the air, slapped his wings above his body, touched down again, and resumed his circling.

As I watched, something about that wing thing struck me; it seemed specific, not random. When I got home, I looked into it. The behavior I witnessed is called “wing clapping,” and though it’s unusual, pigeons aren’t the only birds that do it. The male short-eared owl also wing-claps to impress the female, or to warn off predators. He snaps his wings below his body—instead of above, like a pigeon—in two to six bursts of clapping that some say sound just like applause.

Speaking of applause, I’m an actor, as I mentioned. I bring that up because I’ve discovered that the most important skill I use in acting I also use when I’m looking at birds. That skill is listening—by which I don’t mean hearing what another actor is saying or the sound a bird is making. When I’m on stage with a scene partner, I might find myself thinking about what I’m going to eat after the show: maybe tonight I’ll get the steak frites. Then I’ll think that the audience hates me and wants me off the stage, that I should give up acting. My focus flits about, taking in everything except what is right in front of me—which is my scene partner, my fellow actor, who is a source of energy and can provide stimuli that are unique and unknown to me.

How can I focus on them? I make a concerted effort to shut out all that is not my fellow actor. As my focus narrows, it also gets deeper because it’s penetrating and intent on the essence contained within a single point: the actor. This is a process that’s by default imperfect. My mental chatter continues, my eyes dart here and there, my body moves around the stage, but I’m still capable of simultaneously focusing on the actor. That’s the tension, and it’s possible to hold it for a finite period of time.