I recently went birding for the first time in two years – having twin babies has a way of putting your hobbies on hold. But this trip to one of my favorite spots, Huntley Meadows Park in Alexandria, Virginia, reminded me why I love it so much.
Ambling along the wetlands boardwalk, I saw two birds for the first time: a common yellowthroat and a blue grosbeak.
I’m no ornithologist, but I’ll venture a scientific observation: If the McDonald’s Hamburglar were a bird, he’d be a common yellowthroat. Go ahead, Google it. Tell me I’m wrong.
Why We Wrote This
In a world built for speed and efficiency, birding is delightfully unhurried, an invitation to slow down and notice the natural world. As our essayist puts it, it’s a refreshing antidote to modern life.
This bird has mocked me since I began birding six years ago. It’s very common, you see – one might even call it the everyday or can’t-miss-it or dime-a-dozen yellowthroat. For me, it might as well have been a resplendent quetzal. But on this special day, I was finally rewarded for my patience, as the diminutive masked beauty settled delicately on a slight branch overhanging the boardwalk.
As for the blue grosbeak, I’d heard rumors of it and tracked its appearance on eBird, a bird-tracking app. I always hoped to see one, but never really expected to. With its prominent beak and sapphire blue and pumpkin orange plumage, this bird looks like it hangs out with toucans in Costa Rica – and yet here it is, smack-dab in our unassuming Beltway woods.
Les Winkeler/The Southern Illinoisan/AP/File
Approaching a small meadow, I’d spotted something perching on a bird box – larger than a bluebird but not a blue jay – and when it turned for a moment to preen itself and flashed that bright orange wing bar, well, I could hardly believe it.
That’s one of the charming things about birding. Anyone can be good at it. It’s not like chess, golf, basketball, piano, rock climbing, or really any other hobby. With birding, you could very well put binoculars to eyes for the first time and see something a veteran birder never has.
Birding is delightfully free of decisions. You just sit back and watch what unfolds around you – sun shining, insects buzzing, birds flitting, leaves rustling. Who knows what you’ll see?
It also reveals the treasure that surrounds us. Some of my most magical discoveries have taken place on the half-mile wooded loop in my neighborhood, where I’ve come across a flock of cedar waxwings feasting on berries; two indigo buntings playing tag above a lazy, trickling stream; and three generations of a hawk family hatching, fledging, flying, soaring.
But here’s what I love the most about birding: It slows you down. That’s in stark contrast to everything else in our modern world, which is built to speed you up – social media, cable news, Grubhub, express lanes, iPhones, Spotify, those moving walkways at airports.
Not the case with birding. It forces you to pay attention, to observe the world with an unrushed gait and an unhurried eye. If you hope to see anything, you have to stand in place for extended periods of time without looking at your phone. Crazy, I know. It’s a delightful antidote to our modern world.
As author and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch once put it in a 1961 essay in Life magazine, “We have not merely escaped from something but also into something; … we have joined the greatest of all communities, which is not that of men alone but of everything which shares with us the great adventure of being alive.”
