How Birdwatching Will Revive Your Soul
My favorite hobby teaches us to pay attention to the world as it really is.
There are many reasons why I haven’t written as much in this space: travel, some personal medical stuff, and an unusually high number of authors who require, let’s say, a “high-touch” editorial experience. Another reason I haven’t written here much is because, for the past several weeks, I have spent a lot of evenings and weekends out at Columbus’s metro parks, looking at birds.
We are nearing the end of the high holy days of birdwatching, also known as spring migration. And a lot of birdwatchers are out on the trails, hoping to spot an Eastern towhee or a green heron or, especially, a warbler.
Warblers are a tiny, energetic species that, every spring, migrate back to North America after enjoying a long, tropical vacation somewhere below the equator. Every spring, birdwatchers likewise travel hundreds of miles in hopes of spotting a rare warbler, such as the Connecticut or the Cerulean. A few weeks ago, while out with my boyfriend on a walk, I started jumping up and down after thinking I had spotted a hooded warbler in some brush. He thought my excitement was cute. He’s about to be converted.
I’ve been birdwatching my entire adult life, getting into it around the time my parents did. Some of the appeal is the game of it all: how many species have you seen? How long is your life list? (Mine is somewhere around 400 . . . so only 10,600 species to go.) More of the appeal, though, is that birdwatching helps me to see creation. And by paying better attention to creation, taking delight in how colorful and funny and strange it is, we can love it and the Creator more deeply.
Courtney Ellis writes about her love of birdwatching in the book Looking Up: A Birder’s Guide to Hope Through Grief. The relatively new audiobook version features birdsong at the beginning of each chapter. Ellis, a pastor in Mission Viejo, California, and I spoke recently, just as spring migration was getting into full swing. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
A lot of readers are curious about birdwatching but don’t know how or where to start. How did you start?
About two weeks before the pandemic, a friend of mine was visiting our house and looked out the window and said, “You have a phoebe in your yard.” I didn’t know what that was; a phoebe is not in the category of a robin. I peeked out the back window and there’s a black phoebe, which are these beautiful little Western flycatchers that look like they’re wearing black tuxedos.
The phoebe came back the next day and the day after that. And I realized, this bird has probably been in my yard for years and I’ve literally never seen it. I’ve not noticed what’s happening right outside my window.
During the pandemic, I realized that walks were going to save me and started taking a walk every day. And just down the trail from my house are 40-50 different species of birds, and it just threw me back on my heels. What else haven’t I been noticing, as a person, as a pastor, as a human being? I fell in love with the birds, and really in a deep way, they got me through the pandemic. It was my daily dose of hope.
What I’ve tried to tell people as a pitch for birdwatching is that it gives you an entry point through which to notice creation. It gives you something to focus on. What are some practical pointers for where people can start?
Birding is so great that way, because the bar for entry is so low. You can be a 3-year-old birder, you can be a 103-year-old birder, and you don’t need a lot of money to get started.
First, a decent pair of binoculars. I you go to the Audubon website they’ll start you on $3,000 binoculars—don’t purchase those. But also, don’t purchase the $25 ones because they won’t work. The $150 Nikon binoculars can get you in the door [ed. note: these are the ones I have], and then get yourself a basic field guide of your particular area, and then download the Merlin app. I’m an evangelist for two things in this life, one is Jesus and the other is Merlin. It’s from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and it helps you identify birds by sight, but it’s also is like Shazam for birds. You push the sound ID, and it will tell you what you’re listening to. (Instructions for download here.)
As soon as you start to recognize their calls, they kind of become friends to you. You go out into your backyard and think, “Oh the white-crowned sparrows are singing this morning.” It opens up this universe of delight and interest and joy.
I talk to a lot of folks who say, “Well I’m not really a birder,” and I say, “Well if you’ve ever looked out a window and love a bird, you’re a birder.”
I’ve been birdwatching my whole adult life and would agree that a $150 Nikon pair of binoculars and the Sibley guide are a great place to start. I used Merlin to identify all sorts of new birds on a trip out West, and it was a game changer.
Talk about what birdwatching does for us on a spiritual level.
Birdwatching brings us back to this place of delight that we all knew as kids. I used to bemoan the fact that it would take me 20 minutes to get one block from my condo to the car with my toddler, because every stick was amazing and every leaf was amazing. But he was right. Birdwatching takes you back to this place where you’re more in touch with delight.
In The Book of Delights, Ross Gay set out to write a short essay about delight every day, and he said it developed a sort of “delight radar.” When you start looking for delights, you find more of them. So often our Christian faith is about holiness and asceticism and all good, deep things, but we’ve missed that at the heart of it all is delight. Birding puts me back in that place. I turn around the corner and don’t know what I’m going to see and gasp! it’s a vermilion flycatcher, and my day has been transformed. And not because I tried to be joyful. When I birdwatch I don’t have to force it, and that connects me more deeply to the source of all joy, which is the Lord.
As a pastor, birding has been transformative because it has taught me deeper ways of paying attention. I used to be quite literal and think, “If someone has a problem, they’ll come talk to me and tell me what it is.” But so much of pastoring is watching the widow walk into the church on a Sunday morning and seeing that her shoulders are sagging a little more heavily. Okay, that’s a phone call, I need to check in on her.
If you’re spending time trying to differentiate one warbler from the next, when they’re all kind of yellowish and grayish and blackish, you learn how to see more deeply and be more divinely attentive—to our neighbors and also to ourselves. When I’m out on the trail, that’s often when the things that have been shaken up in my heart like a snow globe start to settle, and I realize, “I’m frustrated about this,” or “I’m anxious about this.” It’s often a chance to pray, sometimes without words, in those silences.
Birdwatching may be the top reason I think I’m going out on a walk, but on a deeper level it’s to become recentered, to become quieter, to be able to hear God’s voice more clearly. So this is why often when I’m out birdwatching and a group of people are speaking loudly or on their phones, I get very agitated.
Or, God forbid, they’re hiking with a speaker. God doesn’t like those people [laughs].
Outdoor etiquette is another conversation.
At the same time, there have been times that I’ve gone birdwatching with other people, where being with other people has enhanced the experience because if you all get to see a Connecticut warbler, this is a core life memory you’ve shared. And very practically, the more people you have looking for a bird, the higher the chances you’ll be able to identify it.
So talk about the dimensions of birdwatching that are about solitude and the dimensions that are more social and communal.
Mary Oliver has a poem that has the line, “If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.”
My job is very people-facing and I’m very introverted, and I love that my job pulls me out of my shell. But often at the end of a long week, I almost cannot be with other people and need the reset of being out in nature, even if it’s just sitting in my own backyard, which is where I do hear the most clearly from God in the quiet of looking for birds, where I’m prepared for something to happen. The quiet-facing piece of birding is deeply valuable, and that’s how I do the bulk of my birding.
And, going out with people is transformative in its own way. I love going to bird fests. I went to the Cape May Birding Festival in New Jersey a couple years back. We’re starting at morning watch, which is hundreds of thousands of warblers flying overhead, and the guide says, “Yeah, they’re all yellow-rumped warblers, Oh! but there’s a black and white warbler.” And these birds are so small, they look like specks of pepper on a tablecloth. And the warbler comes closer and sure enough. I had no idea that level of identification was even possible.
I also love taking out newer people. I was just on a walk this morning with my 12-year-old son, who’s a budding birder, and he spotted the roadrunner up ahead on the trail and said, “Mom, I think I just leveled up as a birder!” There’s so much joy watching that spark for other people.
In Looking Up, you share that you had stumbled into birdwatching around the same time that a beloved family member passed away. How was birdwatching connected to the work of grieving your family member?
It’s been astonishing to me to learn how common this story is, of folks who got into birdwatching because the cancer was back or the divorce was finalized. In my case, my grandfather fell very ill in 2021. He fell, which is often the beginning of the end for elderly folks, and I flew to Wisconsin to see him. He wasn’t a hermit but he was hermit-adjacent, he was more comfortable in nature and with animals than he was with people. Birding became this practice where I was able to grieve his death and let go of these pieces.
As a pastor who has done a lot of work with death and dying, to realize how different it is when it’s your own family member. The longer I’m at this church, the harder the funerals have become. I’ve been here 10 years, and now I’m not burying so many congregants, I am burying friends and colleagues in ministry. There’s nothing that prepares you professionally to handle a loss like this personally.
Times spent out in nature became ways to open up that place of grief in my heart and let it breathe. The prayers didn’t always have words to them, but grief sometimes takes us to a place beyond words. To be able to write this story and honor my grandfather in this way, as the person he way — he could be a really cranky person, this is not a hagiography — and then come back full circle to realize that he was really the first person to introduce me to nature.
My grandmother passed away last year, also after a fall and she was 96, and she and my other grandparents were the ones who modeled for me what it looks like to delight in creation. She volunteered at a bird sanctuary, so I have memories of going as a young child to feed the geese and ducks with her.
Later on, she had a bird feeder, which for a lot of people is where they start, and she would tell a story about having a rose-breasted grosbeak, an indigo bunting, and a Baltimore oriole at her feeder all at the same time, these gorgeous, vibrant birds. It was a gift for her to teach me to love the Lord’s handiwork, to actually show me what it looks like. So when I’m out in creation, I sense it’s a way of honoring her.
She left you a legacy, and you’re carrying it forward.
And I don’t want us humans to lose that. I feel the frantic pace of modern life, and our attention is so divided, and I have three screens around me literally as we’re talking. How easy it is to forget how to pay attention.
I think that connects back to the concept of Christian stewardship. We’re caring for our own souls, and stewarding that gift that God has given us. But also, as soon as you start looking around at the natural world and falling in love with it, it changes your posture toward it.
Birdwatching was the gateway for me for an interest in plants and insects and lizards and biodiversity. For so long, there was this unfair and totally unnecessary bifurcation between care for creation and Christian faith, and those two things are married in Christians and can be married in our own spiritual lives as well. —KB
The Merlin app is quite addictive!
As a fan of Courtney and of Katelyn, I so enjoyed reading this.