Why Birding Beats Baseball

A TeeBeeDee member gives 10 and a half reasons why birding is becoming a national pastime

atowhee

Posted: Dec 17, 06 6:53pm

I was once a hardened baseball fan—I still have my first trading cards from the Topps and Fleer sets of 1953. Then player strikes, egregious behavior by team owners, and outrageous beer prices made me reconsider.

I beat my fantasy league obsession and found a real-world fixation that was simply fantastic, and it has a year-round season.

Here are ten reasons I'm a birder:

1. It's an Endless Learning Experience

With ten thousand species worldwide and that knowledge base constantly expanding, I'll never run out of stuff to learn. Just keeping up with the 716 North American Nesting Birds can be overwhelming. Nine guys on a baseball field? A piddly challenge in comparison. No players sing at dawn, build nests or migrate ten thousand miles.

2. You Must be Outdoors

Like most Americans, I spend my working days in an airless building, looking through glass at the real world. As one birder put it simply: "I marvel at nature."

3. It's Extremely Portable

I can bird anywhere: city, country, through a car window. I can bird from Alaska to Antarctica, from airport runways to art museums.

4. The Lists

Life lists, day lists, country lists, yard lists. If you don't see the value of keeping lists, seek therapy. The American Birding Association keeps official life list records for the United States.

5. Travel is Optional

Hate travel? Become an expert on the birds in your yard, park, pasture, or town. I've seen new species in the center of London, Venice, Paris, Manhattan, and Tokyo. I could do the same in Quito, Singapore, or Bucharest. One birder said, "Whenever I travel, I discover that land by searching for birds."

6. The Camaraderie

Birding is international. In general, I find other birders to be open-minded, curious, good travelers, and interested in many topics. One birding couple wrote, "We found that birders were friendly, sharing people who were also willing teachers."

7. It's Flexible

Birding can be a competition, a hobby, a vocation, or sedentary past-time. I can bird for fifteen minutes, or for weeks. I can spend thousands on optics or use my father's old binoculars. I can take trips or just start looking around. At work the other day I pointed out a Peregrine Falcon eating a small bird on a building nearby. My boss was amazed. It was a five-minute birding break.

8. The Challenge

Can I identify that song? Can I find the rare vireo in a fluttering flock? Can I fight seasickness to spot the albatross twenty miles offshore? One birder says "the fun is in the search."

9. Birding is 24/7

Any day, any season. Owls and nighthawks after dark.

10. The Birds

Wondrous, mysterious, variable, active, surprising. Are Ivory-billed Woodpeckers still in the swampy woods?

10A. The Beauty

Some find beauty in a winning home run, a Mozart opera, or a perfect Cabernet, but those cannot match the song of a Marsh Wren hidden deep in the reeds along a cold, fog-shrouded lake…or the slow circles of White Pelicans landing silently on a lagoon.

Those are my own reasons for becoming a birder; what will yours be?

Want to Try Birding?

We should all be birding right now because it's the count season. The 107th Annual Christmas Bird Count goes from December 14th to January 5th. It's the largest citizen science project in the world, where people come together and count different bird species on special outings or simply by keeping track of who's visiting the feeder in their backyard.

Here's where to register for your first, or your next, CBC. Beginners are welcome.

For more information:

• My website: www.towhee.net
• Audubon
• Learn Bird Songs