You Should Be Looking at Birds

It’s as easy as it is rewarding

For a long time I have told people, with an amount of frustration, that I liked bird-watching before it was cool to like bird-watching. This isn’t actually true, as it has always been kind of cool to like bird-watching. Basically, all the cool guys of history have liked it.

Aristotle was super into bird-watching. He was also arrogant (as many of the great thinkers throughout time have been and still are), so he made sweeping false statements about birds. He saw birds disappear in the winter and, even though many early scientists were already onto migration, he told everyone that some birds actually didn’t leave in the winter, but rather hid. He took it a step further and said that some birds transformed into other birds — and still other birds transformed into entirely other things. European redstarts, Aristotle said, reshuffled themselves into European robins in the winter. And the geese that arrived in Greece in the fall, he was sure, bloomed from barnacles that grew on sea driftwood. To this day, we still call that species “barnacle goose.”

The renowned ornithologist John James Audubon was, by all accounts, relatively well-liked. (I know this because I Googled “Did John Audubon have friends?” and the internet said yes he did. He was also married, so two for two.) Pretty much all the…