I think these days we are all in need of a little beauty, cheer, peace and wellness! Guess what? Birdwatching fulfills all of these needs. A study in 2017 in the UK confirmed what all of us birders have been guessing: bird watching is good for your physical and mental health. Some even view it as a spiritual practice. For me, it is certainly a daily practice that brings peace and offers meaning to my life.
Terry Tempest Williams said it best when she wrote:
“I pray to the birds…I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.”
For me, attunement to avian lives offers a way out of what I have called the “Cartesian delusion”: the idea that human lives are the center of the universe. It pulls me out of my human bubble of experience, and allows me a window into another. The inventor of the field of semiotics Jakob Von Uexkull once suggested that these bubbles of experience are lifeworlds, and that life is composed of the entanglement of all of these lifeworlds. It is healthy for us to concern ourselves with other lifeworlds that surround and weave into our own.
When I watch the crows who have recently paired off and built nests, who now devote most of their time to finding food to feed their mates, and eventually their nestlings, I see their devotion to family, their cultural lives, and that they struggle and suffer every day, but also engage in joyful fun, like the wind dances I have photographed. They are intelligent, cultural, creative and a part of our urban worlds.
