How to Fall in Love with Birding

This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. And I'm Ryan Goldberg, journalist and author of Bird City Adventures in New York's Urban Wilds.

So let's start out. Can you tell me the story of your spark bird, but also tell me what a spark bird is? So a spark bird is the bird that really... catalyzes your your interest in birding it's sort of like you almost have like a Before and after moment and the spark bird is the bird that excites that moment It's the bird that once you see that you think to yourself. How have I not been?

seeing birds this whole time and it becomes it's sort of like the start of your birding journey really begins that with that one bird my spark bird is an eastern toey It's a type of sparrow. It's sort of russet in black it's not uncommon it's quite common in like the eastern half of the us and it kind of roots around in the leaf litter and kicking around for bugs and things like that and I saw an Eastern Towie in the spring of 2016.

i was out birding actually with my aunt who had introduced me to it with my girlfriend at the time now wife and also my parents my aunt in the family is like the the or birder. She's the one who's introduced all of us to it. And so we were birding at a place just outside New York City, which is where I live in New Jersey at a place called Sandy Hook. And I saw this Eastern Towie. actually come out of the leaf litter where it normally resides.

and it perched up on a little cedar tree and started singing and this bird was so it was a male because the male songbirds are typically the ones that do the singing in the spring and so this towhee was just giving it his all he was like singing like his life depended on And in a way it kind of did. He's singing to attract a mate.

And I just saw that bird up there, beautiful colors. And I was just sort of floored by it. And that was really was my spark bird. And that kind of set off a spark, a series of spark experiences, really.

I live in New York and so I went home and was like, where can I go birding in New York City? Is there any place to bird here? And as it turns out, there are...

amazing and credible in many places to go birding. This is a great segue to my next question, which is that I think a lot of people might assume that urban locales are not great places to go birding. But as you point out, urban... places especially urban places that are coastal are incredible places to go birding and i'm trying to remember the stat in the book that like you can basically see like half of the the birds in the united states in new york is that right

Yeah, it's a little less, but it's sort of like a third of all the birds that have ever been seen in the United States. And that includes Hawaii and Alaska, which gets birds that you don't see in the continental US. So New York has seen has a record of like about a third. of all those species so somewhere around like 430 species of birds have been seen in new york city well and also if you think about it so first of all most of the people that i know who are

deep down this rabbit hole are actually from New York. And I wonder if it's because, and we'll talk more about this through the course of the episode, but I wonder if it's because there's just so much more infrastructure Like there's community. There's people who know the places to go. When you go to those places, you see other people. You open the book with a story of doing counts.

and like what it's like to go birding with someone else and then to like have someone else be like what did you see like that feeling of like other people are doing this with you seems to be a part of it what do you think absolutely i would have never imagined that New York would have this incredible community of naturalists. And I'm almost like... I was about to say urban naturalists, but they're just naturalists who happen to live in a city. The thing about New York and a lot of...

Cities in general and especially coastal cities. So birds sort of often their age-old migration routes often run along You know, well, there's sort of along the Pacific, along the Atlantic, and also like up the center of the country. And in fact, like the most birds in North America migrate up the center of the country. But in cities, there's so much of the natural areas have been paved over.

when birds are migrating, they're getting funneled into the places that we've left for them. You know, the parks, the cemeteries, and those places are almost mimicking the natural areas that would have been there before humans. It's totally eradicated the landscape. And so the birds are getting funneled into these places in New York city. They actually, it's sort of actually the phenomenon is called the central park effect. And it's that like essentially birds.

see all this concrete when they're migrating and then they go to the green and it creates like situations of incredible concentration and so in new york we have the most people the birds are getting funneled into a very small percentage of the of the landscape and birders are seeing such incredible concentrations of birds and i think what's so special about that too is that Like living in a city, you almost have this expectation that you're not in a wild place. And I certainly had that.

feeling until I started birding in 2016 and it was sort of like once I got into birding I was seeing the wildness everywhere in New York and I think that is actually like a really poignant realization to have that you could live in an urban place and actually be surrounded by wildness as embodied by birds. Yeah. And also Greenwood Cemetery, right?

I love that you mentioned cemeteries as like a place. I mean, I used to love just like going on a meandering walk through like Sunset Park and then up to the cemetery. And it is, it's one of like these, it's like a green oasis. you know there's prospect park as well in brooklyn but like there are these places that have been set aside because of smart city planning um that allows you like i've never thought about going birding there but that seems like it's a wonderful

contemplative thing to do in a cemetery yeah and you're the especially like on weekdays the only people i think at greenwood are birders like if you see most of the people i see at greenwood are fellow birders and obviously some people coming to visit their love ones but um it's actually so cool about greenwood is that they some years ago they sort of realized that a lot of the people that were coming there were coming there

for birding and for tranquility. And so they've actually pivoted a lot with their landscape management. to rewild some parts of the cemetery so greenwood is becoming like an even better birding location because of the decisions that are being made by their horticulturalists

Okay, this is exactly the sort of stuff that I wanted to talk about. I'm very excited. We have really good questions and they're going to bring us through all different corners of burning culture. So this first question comes from Allison and will set us up for the rest of the episode.

It seems like birding has become incredibly popular in the last five years, but what was the actual mechanism for that? For context, I grew up with a father who was really into birding, so I was aware of it as a hobby even before I started birding myself. More specifically,

I was aware of it as a hobby that was transmitted primarily by people who were already steeped in the culture, sharing their localized knowledge and expertise with younger or more novice birders. Now it seems like everybody likes birding, but how are they getting into it? How are they learning? Who were they learning from? Okay, so you were part of this trend. I was, yeah. And also, I think the book, in some ways, there's a framework there about your journey and a lot of other people's journeys.

What's happening? Are millennials just getting old? This is sort of like a real common thing on social media right now, which is sort of like, when did I wake up and become a birder? What decisions did I make in life that led me to this point? I mean, Allison's right that... It really birding, I think historically has been a real mentorship culture. And so when I started, it was sort of before the advent. of a lot of the now really popular apps like Merlin, BirdID, which I'll talk about.

I started birding before that. I joined the Brooklyn Bird Club, which has been around since 1909. And very quickly, I became friends with and developed sort of like a mentorship from several older and seasoned birders and you know for the longest time you would sort of learn

From the field guides that were out there, you would learn from books and you would learn from, you know, people who've been birding for decades. They would teach you things that you just don't find in the field guides. But what Alison's saying, like in the last five years. she's uh allison's hitting on something which is that like the pandemic changed everything i think for birding and so it was during that time as you know that people

You know, when they were in lockdown, they were at home, maybe they were outside, but social distancing. And like, all of a sudden you were sort of like, what do I do with myself? Or even like, I'm home now during the day and I hear a bird song. You know, and this is the spring of 2020. Yeah.

Birds migrate north in the spring and they go south in the fall. And birds are singing in the spring. Birds don't typically sing in the fall. So people were at home or going for walks when they started like... migrating birds were starting to arrive across the continent. And I think people were just like hearing things that they hadn't heard before. Also like the noises and the sounds, especially if you live in a city, were like dialed down.

Yeah. So I think that like that was a key moment where people really started to get into birding. And in fact, like people call themselves a pandemic birder. So like I know birders who describe themselves as a pandemic birder. It's like a common term. Right, right. Like just to kind of situate yourself as like, this is how I got into it. And I think that that like signals some things.

positive and negative probably to other people. It's like, I'm still a relative novice, perhaps, right? But also there's an eagerness. And I think you're right that this is like, I'm a big gardener. And so... I was a gardener before the pandemic, but during the pandemic, there was a massive rise in gardening, too. Like, what are things that you can do without being in close proximity to other people? And birding is one of them.

Running is one of them, gardening. But I also think like, as we'll talk about later, like you have the technology that facilitates it and you have the infrastructure in place. And this is true with gardening as well. So you had these clubs, you had like, I'm a... dahlia grower and there are these like like these clubs that have been in place for decades and have been very hungry for new blood right like they are thrilled like they're kind of it's kind of itchy but also they're so excited

Yeah, when I joined the Brooklyn Bird Club, my wife and I, when we joined, we went to like a mixer that the club put on. And it was like a low-key way for them to also recruit you into various committees at the club. 100% yeah and I got roped into editing the newsletter from that that particular cocktail hour and

We were honestly like 20 years younger than everybody else there. You know, at the time we were in our like early to mid 30s. So and now I feel like the boomer of the club. Like there are people that are younger than me that are more connected to. technology than me. So yeah, there was the infrastructure in place. The Brooklyn Bird Club, I know as like a member of it that our membership doubled, like in the first year of the pandemic. And it has stayed that way. I mean, our membership.

Like it costs $25 to join. So, and all the walks we do are free and everything. So you had these like older clubs.

that have been around a long time some of which have been on like life support yeah not so much recently but like probably in the 60s and 70s i hear stories from some of the old timers about the club being on you know our club being on life support um you have like you know some really great established naturalist societies in new york like the linnaean society new york city bird alliance so you had like these established groups that

you know yeah we're like you know so happy to have new members but then you also like there has also been such a growth especially in urban birding like with younger people and people starting their own clubs so like in new york the feminist bird club was started by brooklyn birders and that is now has chapters in a number of cities and and like different countries

You had like the Queer Birders Club in New York. Black Birders Week was started by a group called Black AF and STEM Collective in 2020. And that is like a way to highlight different perspectives, different people. that this is an activity that is inclusive and it's for everyone. So yeah, you had like the old guard and the new guard. And yeah, there were these groups that could kind of bring you in. But I think also...

What Allison's question really gets that too is just the technology has changed so much in a really short period of time You know people use like I mentioned, Merlin Bird ID, which is an app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. And this will help you, well not help you, it will identify the sounds of birds and does a really good job of it. It'll also like help.

you identify visually based on certain things you put in or if you upload a photo. And so I think there's so much information out there on the internet now, so many websites. And then also just like...

social media has kind of picked up birding and it's sort of having a moment. It's actually really funny. I'm not very active on social media, but like friends send me videos from... tick tock and from instagram and like i see these and they're hilarious and like there was one recently that i thought was so funny it was like a hungover bird watcher in new york city

32 year old hungover bird watcher in new york city and he's just like getting out there and talking about all the bad decisions he's made in his life that have led him to this point looking so forlorn and like i saw this guy birding in brooklyn in prospect park in may like after that video and like you know and like hushed tones i was like there's the hungover birdwatcher

You know, this is something I've thought a lot about in terms of like finding hobbies. There's also these things like I joked about the fact that millennials are getting older. But I think millennials and maybe even like older Gen Z is trying to figure out, OK, like, who am I apart from my. ability to work who am I what do I actually like to do

And I think finding a hobby and especially one that that I think like and we'll talk about this later scratches some itches in terms of like categorization and checking things off lists. And as you said. it's almost like the app lowers the barrier to entry. Because I think in the past, and this remains my barrier to entry, is that I don't have the ear for it.

I have not or I have not developed I have not yet developed the ear for distinguishing calls. And the app kind of gives you like, okay, well, here's a start. And then if you can identify that, then you can kind of go from there. And then there's just like the idea that like, what if we do something together, right? This is like, I think also in part pandemic fueled is a response to the isolation of the pandemic and a desire to figure out how do we hang out again?

as adults absolutely i mean the community aspect is i think my favorite part of birding now i don't know if i would have expected that going in yeah But like I have a birding crew in Brooklyn and it is like the most fun. I was about to say wholesome, but it's not like we love.

to party like our birding crew goes hard when we're done birding we sort of have a clubhouse which is a bar in in in windsor terrace in brooklyn called adirondack where it's like we all meet up after birding and so um but this But our group is like, we come from all walks of life, an entire spectrum of age, race, ethnicity, class, and all these people coming together. and and oftentimes like we don't have that much in common other than birding right but it's such like a strong

kind of passion that it like bonds, you know, this like eccentric eclectic group of people. Yeah. And that's the thing. When you're really into something, you can talk about it for a really long time. Like there's a lot to talk about. The Culture City podcast is sponsored by OLLI. I have dogs that are just so picky and sometimes they decide, oh my gosh, I'm just going to like stop eating this food because we've been eating it for three or four months. And the way that I get them back on track.

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Thanks to Miracle Made for sponsoring this episode. Next question is about what are the possible benefits of birding? And this comes from Anjali. Is there anything about birding and cognition or focus relative to other mindfulness techniques? I'm thinking especially about older folks who are experiencing normal age-related memory changes. I'm a 40 year old who informally got on the birding train years ago and I've tried to get my 77 year old mother on board for years.

We finally cracked open her new hyperfixation on a family trip to Costa Rica, and now a huge part of her every day is oriented around the neighborhood birds. I just walked in from the evening commute to a recap of two robins, four blue jays, and two red-bellied woodpeckers on her afternoon walk. She's notoriously terrible at technology. I just walked her through attaching something to an email for the 50th time, but she is somehow very facile with the Merlin app.

Her short-term memory has been slowly going the last few years. I think it's normal aging. But with the birding, I feel like her ability to focus and pay attention has improved. Is this just another way into mindfulness? Okay, so I love this idea of focus and mindfulness as part of birding. So what's your experience with that and others' experience with that? Yeah, I mean, birding is very much like... prolonged noticing like you really have to focus in on what you're looking at and like

When you first start birding, it's really hard. It's like actually really hard. It's actually can be very frustrating. You're like, what is that? Like I, it moves fast. It's small. It's up in the trees. I can't identify it. So you actually have to like just.

i mean it's probably why it's not for everyone but it's like you have to really slow down and try to be very much mindful of what you're seeing to make an identification of a bird you really want to look at like the bird's size the bird's shape like some species of birds like are very similar so you're looking for really small differences like the length of the tail or the pattern of the undertale and so i think you have to be very much

In the moment, noticing and like keeping mental notes of what you're seeing and often in like a blink of an eye to be able to just identify that bird or to be able to listen for it. to be able to listen to the song and to think about the bird song and describe it, describe like the features of it. So I do think that like for me personally, when I first started birding, it really like awakened all my senses. And living in a place like New York, like that maybe was a slight.

curse and i'll explain why but because the first time i went birding um like i mentioned it was 2016 or the first time i went bird in new york city after this spark bird experience i had yeah was with the Brooklyn Bird Club. And it was like a spring migration walk in May of 2016. And I like... kind of like was overwhelmed by the, both the amount of birds we were seeing, the different kinds of birds, the species names were all new to me. And I remember like being in Prostock Park's forest.

which is the only forest in Brooklyn. It's like the last forest. And there was this... bird that was singing and it was this like low rolling two note song the bird was going Peter Peter Peter and I turned to this guy next to me named Bob who had been he became my immediate mentor in like an hour

I turned to Bob and was like, what is that singing? And he goes, it's a tufted titmouse. And I honestly feel like in that moment, I had never really heard Bird sing before until that day. Like I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. I'm sure we had Cardinals and Blue Jays. I honestly don't ever remember listening to a bird until that moment in my life. And the bird flew in and like a tough to tip mouse is this like.

charming little bird it's small it's gray it has like beady black eyes and like a crest like a dorsal fin and it was like kind of comedic almost and i i was like how have i never seen or heard this bird before and when i left the park that day

I heard everything. Like I left Prospect Park and all of a sudden I heard sirens. I heard traffic. I heard... everything and i think living in new york especially you tune out everything it's like a defense mechanism like you almost have to and so i had blocked out sound but after hearing that tufted titmouse i feel like i became so

aware of everything around me that i was hearing everything and to this day it's like you know i hear that so i guess the mindfulness comes in with hear the siren but just like let it pass you know here are these things but within that cacophony i'm also listening for birds now because in new york they could be anywhere so uh side note but i was delighted to learn that the plural of titmouse is either

tit mice or tit mouses and also it's not to do with mouse it's that tit mouse is the old english word for bird is that right small bird yeah small bird yeah yeah exactly so yeah england has birds that are like called tits and they're basically like our chickadees there's the great tit and the coal tit uh the blue tit and so these are birds that yeah the tit mouse

like with english people who named our tip mouse would have been like those birds would have been brought to mind so yeah it needs just small birds so there are probably sticklers out there that would say it has to be tip mouses because Names don't come from, but I still hear people and I think tit mice just sounds better. It does. It does.

This reminds me too of in gardening, there are different flowers that have wort, W-O-R-T, at the end of it. So like master wort is one of my favorite flowers that grows in my shade garden. And it's that, it's not that they... look like warts or anything like that it's that a wart w-o-r-t was the way to classify something that was medicinal so it's always interesting that we like the way that we think of these connotations um and i totally agree with you about like

The way that in New York, like in order to survive with the assault of sounds and smells and everything, that you develop these coping mechanisms that allow you to not notice almost, right? And that things that teach you to notice are really effective. I live on an island of 900-something full-time residents. There are very few cars, and especially during the times when the ferry's not running, there are even fewer cars.

When I'm walking the dogs or running, I walk or I run in the middle of the road. And so you become very, very attuned to like, here's the sound of a car coming, but also that's the sound of a bird. Or that's the sound of like, you know, there's just different animals that you hear, but especially birds. And I think that like...

Either you can subtract away sounds the way that I have in an incredibly rural space, or you can isolate the sounds the way that you do when you're birding, and then it allows you to hear everything else as well. It's really nice.

um okay next question i love this one this comes from mel what is it about birding as a hobby that sneaks up on you so quickly

One minute you're young and cool, the next you're creeping through the woods looking for Pileated Woodpecker's Merlin app in hand. Hey, I feel like this is familiar to you. What do you think it is that makes it... like an it has like a what's the word for it like a hockey stick growth like I know one bird I know a hundred birds and I this is true I think for a lot of immersive hobbies like I grew

four dahlias and then I grew 400 dahlias and this year I'm growing 1200 dahlias so what's like what is the exponential growth component

Hearing that question, I'm like, how much time do we have? Do we have four hours? Yeah, I think like, gosh, there's so many ways to answer this. I think that certainly the... there is a like a collecting aspect of birding that is like very a very big part of it i think not for everyone and like people have different styles of birding so i think the sort of the listing aspect which is

Birds lend themselves to this kind of sense of collection and listing. And so people will have their life list. They will have their county list, their state list, their local. patch list like which is like maybe the near part you know the closest park to you that you bird the most most frequently so people like it kind of just lends itself to that there are like something like maybe 900 birds in north america and 10 000 in the world so there's like just enough that it's like a challenge

to try to see them all if you want to but it's like an attainable challenge you know and it's not like you have to memorize so many things it's you know and and you start to learn about different birds that you know migrate through maybe where you live and then

you then begin to see like if one shows up that doesn't belong there you start to you know you you learn these things so it's it is like it has that from a hobby perspective it really lends itself to that type of categorization i think for me personally um really the two things that really you know, it got its like hooks into me with was one, this sort of community, which, you know, I've talked about, but also just like birds are such wild creatures.

they really are like a gateway into wildness. You know, like I said, even living in New York, like birding has given me a license to explore the city in a way that I hadn't explored it before I started birding. So I've lived... 20 years in New York and essentially it's now split half and half between when before I was a birder and Since I became became a birder and I think like

It just has like allowed me to find places, whether it be in New York. I mean, beaches, marshes, woods, grasslands, some really interesting. places some really peculiar places like former landfills that have been capped and are now grassland so birds are really like the wildest i think birds are the wildest creatures that we can see in our daily lives um there was like an a birding friend of mine who used to say that like nobody goes bear watching and i think

False, but I get it. Or he was like, basically, you can't get that close. So maybe you go bear watching, but you can't get too close. And also there's like three kinds of bears. That you could see as opposed to like 900 birds in North America. That's so true. Orcas go by my island semi often and like people will put little spottings on next door to say like they're at this point or at this point. But again, you like see their fin.

And you're like, there's an orca. That's cool, right? Whereas when I see an eagle fighting with a seagull just outside my door, I'm like, that's sick. And I am so close to nature being nature. Absolutely.

yeah it's really interesting and the sort of intellectual challenge of being able to actually like you know there's different types of gulls and so to be able to identify the gull and like the intellectual challenge of birding is really exciting um to try to make that identification and i think like essentially Given how wild birds are they really

just connect us to maybe like a wilder part of ourselves, you know, of what it means to be human and to actually realize that we inhabit this same world as these creatures and that their migrations. kind of bring it all together, actually. Yeah. And I also think this goes back to the earlier question about mindfulness, too. Once you figure out the soothing qualities of that noticing.

it's difficult to back off of it. You're kind of like, this is all I want to do ever. And you mentioned this in the book that once you start doing it, you're kind of like, well, why aren't I doing this? all the time. And so there's an escalation as you figure out how to incorporate more of the hobby into your everyday life.

Yeah, totally. I mean, my case is like a, I had to go and write a book about it to be able to do it more often. You know, I've been a reporter for like over 20 years, and I've been freelance for 17 years. years and so I was becoming a little delinquent I think

Right. You're like, I could write, I could pitch a freelance article or I could go birding. Or I could go birding. You know, it's spring. Like, no, you know, I haven't out of office for the whole month of May. So I think I realized if I want to be doing this often.

Now I think I found my topic, basically. I found my subject. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and I think that this, for me, I sometimes use, now I'm like, oh, yeah, sorry, I have to decline that interview because it's Dahlia digging season or whatever. Like it becomes a very useful.

way actually to say no to more work in a way that I think like we we can joke about it being delinquent but it's also like a way to not work all the time which is useful Today's episode of the Culture Study Podcast is sponsored by Blissey.

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The way that we approach hobbies and like our tendency to only think about them as work. I think we need to talk about this more. And Mel mentions this app called Merlin. And I think we have three questions that are all short, but they're all related and they're all kind of about this like categorization impulse just broadly. So we're gonna play them back to back. The first question comes from Jess and we're gonna include this.

second part of our question just for fun and also because we already answered it so okay this one comes from jess i have a couple of questions about birding one the subtle pleasure of a life list has it gone too far and two Who is letting horny ornithologists name birds things like the fluffy backed tit babbler? Now that we know what tit comes from, we know that it's not a horny ornithologist. Okay. And then we have Katie.

What has the incredible popularity of eBird changed about birding culture? And then Melody's going to read this one from Holly. How are folks feeling about the use of Merlin and other apps to turn birding and life lists into just a competition that doesn't really lead to actual knowledge or ability to identify a bird?

So first, I think we should talk about the idea of a life list and how it worked before the apps came along. So how did people keep their life lists? How did they share them? How did they talk about them? Speaking about eBird, like most birders... use eBird. And eBird is like a sort of public database that was set up by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society in the early 2000s.

It is an incredible, incredible tool, incredible resource and database. So everyday birders, everyday enthusiasts are logging their sightings on eBird. And that you can see that with like a, you know. Like on your phone, on your computer, one or two clicks, you can see your lifeless. Like, so you submit your sightings, which are public, although I think you can make them private if you want, but anyone can see like your sightings for that day at that particular place.

You list the amount of time you were out, how many miles you went, the numbers of each bird. You can input media and things like that, photos, recordings. And so... eBird allows you as an individual to see with one click how many birds are on your life list. Before, you would have kept a handwritten record of that. And I mean, I know if you... old timers that still do that, that do not use eBird. But it is an incredible way to categorize this obsession.

You know, and it's also like eBird, you know, without going too far down a rabbit hole, like it's also an incredible. resource for scientists. Scientists use that data. All those observations, all those sightings, they can use that to learn about. which birds are maybe having declines in their population, which birds are having increases, which areas are like maybe really important for conserving and protecting that are maybe not in like a national park or a state park.

scientists use that data they use eBird and now like in the era of big data they're using eBird along with weather radar to determine like the the changes in bird populations where birds are migrating they're learning so much from it all that said it like i don't want to say ebert has like a dark side Oh, no, I think it I mean, this is very similar to the conversation that we had in our running episode about like how Strava works with the running community, because when it's visible, it becomes.

social and also something that you're comparing with other people and there's influencers and all that sort of thing yeah it becomes like i think ebird has added a level of maybe competitiveness that was always there like

The terms bird watching and birding are very different. And so until the 70s, I think the more common term would have been bird watching. You know, you're there to watch the birds. Birding... as almost is like more like a sport and like the term birding that became popular in the 70s was like when people were trying to go out and have the big year like see as many species as they possibly could in a year and people were competing against each other

for those big year records. So the way that data is displayed on eBird is that there is like a top 100 for like eBird leaders, species leaders. So in your hotspot in the county, in the state, in the country, even globally, there is a top 100. And you can see where you fall in that if you're using eBird and your information is public. And so what's so interesting is a great book written a few years ago by Scott Widensaw, a great nature writer.

birding writer and orthologist um called a world on the wing he actually has like a whole chapter devoted to ebird its uses and he says in the book that um ebird was sort of slow on the uptake by birders after it was created but it was only when this feature of the top 100 was introduced that it became more commonly used and probably also the ability to look at your own lifeless but once you could

see where you compare to others and have like a goal to to pursue it became more popular now everyone uses it i mean i use it i you know i don't religiously check my life list. I am not really a chaser, which is like, you know, going out and chasing every rare bird that comes into my area. What's interesting is I don't really admit that to many birders that I'm not a chaser. Like I have it in my book and it's in chapter 14.

out of 14 so it's not something that i like readily admit because it's sort of like understood in the culture of birding that if there's a rare bird in your area especially one you have not seen and could be on your life list like you are gonna drop everything to go find that bird yeah i mean that's even in the beginning of the book right that like during while you're counting you spot a king eider the person that you're with posts it and then like people rush down to try to spot it as well

Man, that is so interesting that the app didn't take off until they essentially gamified it, right? That gave it this competitive edge. And I don't mean to imply that people... because there were chasers before like there were people who would go like I just there's so much in literature birding is such a fixture in literature like people who are

cataloging the birds that they see when they're on like the grand tour or whatever you know what i mean like it was definitely something that people would do while they were on trips or take a trip with the specific goal of seeing wildlife broadly but also birds specifically but i do think it's accelerated is there like a whole industry around taking people on trips i'm sure there is oh yeah

yeah there's like oh yeah i mean all around the world there are like a number of um field guide companies that you know have like the expert top of the line birders one of the people i write about in my book is one of those birders who is one of the best birders, not only in New York, but in the world. And his profession is as a full time.

guide. And that is something that has changed. Like every fall, I like to go to Cape May in New Jersey, which is one of the great birding locations anywhere in the US. And especially in the fall when birds are migrating. Cape May is at the southern tip of New Jersey, and it's sort of like this natural trap for migrating birds, especially.

hawks and other birds of prey so i remember talking to a few birders that are probably in their 60s i would guess and they are professional guides who live in cape may and they had said that their generation was really the first where that could make a living as birders not like authors right though they are authors and artists but like actually as a birder you could become so good at this and then there are people that will hire you to help juice your list. I mean...

And not just juice your list. That's like maybe a little cynical, but also like to bring you to places and help you see birds that you want to see, you know? And I mean, most of these trips go all over the world, but you know. to be able to have that help, to know the right places to go to. Yeah, this is like a huge sort of ecotourism business. Yeah, yeah. It does remind me, though, of like...

The professionalization of hobbies or the professionalization of passion work. Like this is something that historically people would do in their off time from whatever they did for pay. Or if they were people of leisure, then they would just do it whenever they wanted to. But now there is this idea that like, wouldn't it be amazing if I could just do this thing all the time and I could figure out a way to monetize it?

i understand the impulse but then sometimes i also think that it like it create it is part of this larger system that i think as holly is gesturing to like Do you think that there is a loss of skills or knowledge when you're trying to, as you say, juice the list? Well, I think Holly's question... Two, talking about Merlin is so interesting. I've thought about this a lot. So the Merlin bird ID app will identify sounds for you. And I see birders walking around.

prospect park in brooklyn with their phone attached to a lanyard around their neck running merlin non-stop like it is they will have like four hours of tape and merlin is identifying the birds on there in real time and To me, like, I feel like who am I to judge how people bird and it is like, whatever brings happiness to that person is, you know, great. I do think that like...

For me personally, I like to keep my phone in my pocket when I'm out birding. You know, I like to feel like I'm sort of communing with nature. I'm very much in the minority there. Like I... I don't have a camera and most birders do have cameras now so that they can photograph birds. I've like maybe one day we'll get into that, but I feel like.

I'm happy if like a bird has slipped by me that I can't identify because I didn't get a photo of it. But I do think something maybe is being lost a little bit with like someone just keeping Merlin running nonstop. I do think that... it's unless you like go back and listen to that tape when you get home you're not

gonna probably learn the songs and i know from experience that there are like better ways to actually learn the songs um to learn the birds vocalizations like you know you have to do the research and the homework and i you know maybe

People just don't feel like they need to do that, that ultimately the goal for them is to like have that identification that they can add to their list. It does make me wonder sometimes, like, are Birders eBird checklists, like... bigger now since Merlin, like will someone put on there like that? This bird was heard, but like it was heard by Merlin, not them. Yeah, no, I mean, it also gets into like this larger conversation about like learning, like how does learning work?

So again, in my realm, like you can do this thing where you take a picture of a flower and then, you know, even just like Apple photos will try to identify the flower for you. It is incredibly inaccurate.

It is sometimes accurate, but often very inaccurate. And like... does it actually teach you to learn what that thing is sometimes i think that it is useful in setting you down the path right like once you learn what something is then you can start to recognize like that's how learning works like someone tells you something and then you look for it yourself and then what happens the first time that you identify it and then you confirm it you're like now I know something

But if you're only confirming via tapes that someone else is recognizing, it's not going in your head. It's like, I'm speaking if you're always having Google translate something for you. are you actually speaking the language? No, the computer is speaking the language and you're repeating the translation. So yeah, it's really interesting. And I do think it does get to this larger...

Like if you want to optimize a hobby, if you want to have the most things checked off the list, if you want to know the most flowers, or like I grow the most flowers, what's the goal? Maybe that's what I'm trying to think about is like interrogating what is the goal of this hobby? What am I trying to do? Or am I just trying to be like get an A plus in this hobby, which is a very millennial thing to do. Yeah. Or even like to know that.

Yeah, I don't know to be able to look to get that like little endorphin rush from seeing that your list has gone up one. I mean, you know The measure of your life list isn't necessarily how good of a birder you are. It's really often a measure of like, do you have the resources to travel to, you know, travel?

The resources to go to places where you will see a new bird. Like I've birded with people, you know, friends where they're like talking about how big their life lives. And I'll say, well, what was that bird? What did that bird look like that you saw? And they're like, I don't remember. The guy just pointed it out for.

me it's like well then did you really see it you know or did you get to appreciate it or enjoy it or make like a mental note of of some of its characteristics Yeah, it's I mean, the same thing applies, I think, with photography, like, when you have a camera, you cease to notice as as intricately sometimes right but like if you like in your case if you don't have your phone out to take a photo of a bird you're trying to remember what it looks like so they like

You took a picture with your heart of the thing that happened. And also, I think, what if the best birder was actually someone who could... describe with tremendous flourish and accuracy the way that like a local bird sounded instead of this like, it's almost consumerist impulse to check off everything on the list.

Yeah, yeah, it is. And I think like, I think like maybe for some people it changes over time to like you just start to realize like, um what gives me the joy in this and i'm sure i know when i started birding i was much more like religious about keeping my list like immediately you know and now it's like i'll wait till i get home and if i'm off a few numbers on the number of robins i saw that day that's fine you know but i think like

I think you sort of maybe, yeah, like you start to realize what is the aspect of this that I really enjoy. And so I do like the like... You know, the mystery, the sort of problem solving of birding, that's just so much fun. And to have that maybe stripped out a little bit, I think like it's something you lose something a little bit. I remember like.

Some years ago, this was before Merlin, I was birding in a great place in Canada called Point Pelee National Park. And it's like this little sliver of land that juts down into Lake... eerie i think and it's like the sort of southernmost point canada and birds cross the lake and this is like the first piece of land they see and they drop in there and it is an incredible place for birding and you're seeing birds actually land in the morning like land in the treetops yeah

over your head. And I remember birding one day there, and I think I'd been birding only a year and a half at this point. And this was like a big trip to go on to visit this place. And there was one bird I was hearing everywhere.

the song i was hearing this bird song everywhere i could not identify it i just like i i did my homework i knew a lot of other songs at that point that i had learned and i just could not identify the song it was like a three-part song sounded very like machine gun like and I was just like, what is this? And so I could, if Merlin had existed, I could have played it. It would have told me immediately it was a Tennessee Warbler.

However, I didn't have that. So I remember like going home that night and now I could look on eBird and see what other people had submitted in their checklist that day. And I guess maybe the analog version would have been flipping through the field guide and looking at everything. birds description to figure out what makes a three-part machine gun like song however like i did at least have ebird then and i looked at other people's checklists and i saw like some field guide

that was leading a group had like 10 Tennessee warblers. And that was like one bird, not on my list. And I was like, ah, okay, that's what I was hearing. You know, I, I, then I played the song on, on my computer and could hear, yeah, that's what I was hearing. So, you know, there's a, there's a little bit of. problem solving that goes in. And, you know, I like that. I like not maybe having everything to be so clear cut.

Yeah, I was thinking about how what I would do is probably like keep repeating the song in my head so that I could remember it. And then I would like make a voice memo of it so that I would and then play it for someone else. They'd be like, I have no idea what you're doing here.

Our last question is for people like me who are like, this is very interesting. How can I get started? This question is from Kristen. For a relatively new birder who wants to learn everything and integrate themselves into the culture, what are your one or two biggest tips? Things that aren't as obvious as Download Marlin are join your local Audubon Society trips.

Right. You're the perfect person to answer this question. What advice do you have? Well, I think a few things that come to mind. One is, so I do think it's good to go on your local Audubon or local bird club.

walks i think within that it's actually a tip what i would have is to join your local birding club to actually not just go on the walks but join the club and get to know the people in it i mean it's not maybe that's not a path that everybody would pursue but i feel like developing mentorship in birding is a wonderful thing it's wonderful to be able to learn

from others who have been doing it for a long time about the birds. You just learn so much and not just the birds, but you learn about the places and the habitats. You learn about the trees, the flowers. The old time birders that I know are like, and not just old time, but many birders I know, you know, they have this great knowledge of like, they're just all around naturalists. And I think that is a wonderful thing about this hobby and this activity is just.

becoming accustomed to the natural world and birds give you like that. They're the gateway drug for that. So that's one tip. I think maybe two other ones, I would say. One is to really learn.

a bird in terms of identifying being able to identify birds but also know the species and like to learn about them almost as individuals is to like learn a bird's what's known as its distribution which is basically like where that bird is supposed to be at which time of year and where it is in the continent like where it is in the world and so learning a bird's distribution

will really help you to identify that. But when you see a bird, a little warbler, which is like a small, tiny, colorful songbird that migrates between the tropics, like when you... are trying to decipher between maybe a few different types and you're not sure which one it is to think about like what time of year it is where you are what type of habitat it is so learning a bird's distribution i think is also like a way to be able to identify

rare birds to uncover birds that like shouldn't be there at any point in time and you're like wait this is something different and then the last thing I would say sorry but one more is To really learn the birds, if this is accessible for people, I know people that they just... they can't learn bird songs. They can't learn bird vocalizations. I know you said it's difficult, but I feel like learning bird song, if it's possible, is like an...

incredible thing. And it's something that when I started birding, I learned from more experienced birders that really impressed like ear birding, you know, and being able to identify birds by ear, it unlocks like... the dawn chorus for you so the dawn chorus in spring is when all birds are singing right at dawn and like being able to identify the singers in those chorus

in that chorus like allows you to then look for them so if i'm hearing a bird called a black bernie and warbler which is like has like a flame orange throat it's such a beautiful bird and it's one of my favorites like if i hear it's ear-splittingly high last note, then I'm like, oh my god, there's a Blackburnian around. I want to see it. So being able to bird by ear, if that's possible, is like...

It allows you to find more birds and it allows you to like see the birds you really want. And like on a great spring day in New York City and Central Park or Prospect Park, there are more than 100 species of birds there. You know, there might be 100, 100. 120 birds. And so being able to identify them by ear allows you to find the ones you really want to see. It also tells you which birds are around. And there are ways of doing it that are, I think, really effective.

Essentially, I learned this from somebody else who's written about like memorization techniques in birding. And he's a great birder and field guide author named Tom Stevenson. And he has talked about how you can learn songs. And basically, you create playlists. You create like... itunes playlists of bird songs you can download something called the macaulay library which is like put out by cornell and that has all the bird songs in north america so basically create playlists starting small and

gradually making it bigger and just listen to these birds and it allows you to lure them really, really quickly. You mean when I hear the, let me see if I can do it. of the blue herons outside my window. That's how I know it's low tide. I love, love, love, love that advice. And I would also just underline the thing about joining a society.

A huge benefit is intergenerational friendships. And I think that that is like, you know, it's mentorship, but it's also just hanging out with people who aren't exactly like you. just a great thing to do for whatever reason. And this is a great reason to do it. Ryan, this has been such a pleasure. Everything I hope for and more. Can you tell us where people can find you on the internet if they want to hear more from you?

Sure. So people can go to my website if they want to learn more about me and also learn more about my book. It's ryangoldberg.net is my website. And my book, Bird City, which can be found everywhere and just came out. Thanks for listening to the Culture Study Podcast. Today, paid subscribers got a bonus segment that features Melody talking about getting into video games as an adult. It is very cozy.

So if you want to support the show and get that bonus content, head to patreon.com slash culture study. It's five bucks a month or $50 a year. You can also just upgrade your current subscription if you want to become a combo subscriber and you'll get.

ad-free episodes, an exclusive advice time segment, and weekly discussion threads for each episode. And if you don't want to become a paid subscriber, no big deal. One way to support the show is to follow or subscribe or give us a rating in whatever podcast app you use. It's really helpful and it helps others discover the show.

And if you want to suggest a topic or ask a question about the culture that surrounds you or submit a question for our subscriber-only advice time segment, go to our Google form at tinyurl.com slash culturestudypod or check the show notes for a link. The Culture Study Podcast is produced by me, Anne Helen Peterson, and Melody Rowell. Our music is by Poddington Bear. You can find me on Instagram at Anne Helen Peterson, Melody at Melodias47, and the show at Culture Study Pod.