I am a longtime birder and it is my major hobby and interest. In fact, I leave in a week for a weeklong birding trip in Puerto Rico, so far, so good on the coronavirus. Birding is the focus of nearly all my travel, excepting trips to visit family.
I tell people that birding is very rewarding because you only get better at it as you get older (well, until various infirmities set in). But you never reach the end of accomplishment either. And there are so many ways to do it!
There's been an unexpected influx of young people into the hobby, which has been very gratifying. But I also, as a volunteer at a birding center, was VERY welcoming to all the middle-aged people, primarily women, who entered the field. I had been one of them. Yes, there are all the young turks who can see and hear preternaturally. But women are such a sustaining and giving group in this hobby, the ones who staff the centers, arrange the festivals, organize the group trips. Also the ones who lay out the money for eco-travel. I'm thinking of writing an article on the women who organized movements to save local, natural areas - a huge contribution.
I have given a lot of thought to how to describe the appeal of birding, to answer the fairly frequent question, "What do you do when you watch birds? Do you take pictures?" For me, it's not so much a question of "doing" but rather of "being." Birding makes you increasingly aware of the "other world," until you can't *not* be aware of it. All of the time. [Thinking of my late mother, admonishing me to "stop looking at the damn birds" when I drove.] That consciousness is very seductive, and the experience is similar to Dorothy's stepping from the black-and-white world of Kansas into the full-color world of Oz. It's SO rich. I sometimes think it must be similar to the experience of a religious person who lives with the constant consciousness of a spiritual world around him/her. That constant awareness is the appeal. Just yesterday, soon after I got up, I heard - through my closed windows - a woodcock "peenting" somewhere close by in the back. I knew it instantly, got myself out to my deck, in time to see it hurtling through the air. That's the appeal, being an active part of the Other World.
