<As first posted on LinkedIn>
I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the terms #birding and #birdwatching. As I’m often explaining them to students from hunting backgrounds, I will usually lean into the word “hunting” for perspective.
The hunt is all about planning, practicing, preparation, etc. You develop a deep understanding of your quarry so you can predict where it might appear on a given day (that you can take off from work) at a particular time and under specific weather conditions. Many times you will go afield and fail to locate the deer, turkey, etc. that you’re after. Often you’ll have success in finding them but not be in good position to take a shot. Oh, and the typical options for your comfort while sitting quietly in the woods are 1) sweat- and tick-covered or 2) bone-numbingly cold.
And then sometimes it all works out and you squeeze the trigger or release the arrow, leading to the successful harvest form which you’ll reap material and emotional benefits from the experience long into the future.
In terms of the time and energy invested in the hunt, the actual harvest is an infinitesimal portion. That’s why we call it hunting and not “deer-shooting”.
And that’s why I call it birding and not bird watching. The actual watching of birds is a tiny part of the whole experience of predicting what might be and see what is, out there.
A decent analogy, right?
So then here comes Ed Yong – novice but enthusiastic birder – being his effortlessly brilliant self and, through the lens of a slightly different take on the term “birder”, gifts us with a far better analogy. In his latest NYTimes column, Yong is delighted to be considered a birder when he yet feels like a neophyte. He compares it to our use of dancer: anyone can dance, but we don’t typically label someone a dancer without an understanding that they’ve invested time and effort and training to reach a level of expertise worthy of the term. But birders? You don’t have to know much at all to be a birder –– and we’ll start calling you one the minute you first go birding.
I like that. For too long there’s been an air of elitism attached to birding whereby the serious people are birders and the casual folks are bird watchers. But I don’t know anyone who uses the terms that way, and I certainly don’t. If you bird (verb), then you are a birder. I’m glad that’s been Yong’s experience and super-glad that he expressed so in writing.
Maybe it works because there is no level of experience or proficiency that makes sense to discriminate birders from some novice levels. Birding is a continuum of lifelong learning and discovery, with each of us a novice somewhere on that trajectory. That, I suppose, is where the magic lies: birding is infinitely accessible yet endlessly fascinating. That’s why when people describe feelings of boredom, I can’t fully relate. I’m a birder.
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