Seven Reasons You Should Take Up Birdwatching This Year

Abert's Towhee, a common yardbird in my neighborhood, checking out some nuts I left on a wall in my yard

Source: Douglas T. Kenrick

When I was around 5 years old, living in a small apartment in New York, my mother showed me something miraculous. She broke up a piece of stale bread and put it out onto the fire escape in front of our kitchen window. Soon, there was a swarm of beautiful winged creatures, lovely little birds with rufous, tan, and black feathers on their wings, coffee-colored streaks behind their eyes, grey crowns, and black throat feathers above a bright white belly. My mother told me they were called “English sparrows.”

A couple of decades later, I was camping with my own son in Shenandoah National Park, and there were a lot of birds flitting around; we went into a nearby town and bought a cheap pair of binoculars, as well as a small field guide on birds. When we trained our new binoculars on the trees, we were treated to avian displays of brilliant red (cardinals), yellow (goldfinches), and blue (indigo buntings).

But as impressive as those experiences were, I didn’t really become an official birdwatcher until I was closer to 50 years old. And whenever I go birding, I notice that the population of serious birdwatchers includes many more senior citizens than young people. This might be because older people have more time on their hands, or because we are a bit wiser about what makes for a satisfying life experience. In any event, I have learned that birdwatching has some serious psychological benefits, and I recommend it to anyone, perhaps especially to younger people, who, according to one recent survey, now regularly spend five hours every day on recreational screen time (Mowreader, 2025).

Costa Rica's pleasant green hills, where you can find more beautiful birds than almost anywhere else in the world (900 species in a small country the size of West Virginia).

Source: Douglas T. Kenrick

Here are seven reasons it would pay to trade some of those screen hours on watching birds:

1. Birding will inspire you to get outside. A meta-analysis by Coventry and colleagues (2021) summarized 50 studies that examined the effects of being in nature. The benefits of regular exposure to nature included: significant reductions in depression, anxiety, and general negative feelings, as well as significant increases in positive feelings such as happiness and joy. Coventry and colleagues even recommended an optimal dose: getting outdoors for 20 to 90 minutes at a time over a period of eight to 12 weeks should put you on the path to a better emotional life (of course, that doesn’t mean you should stop then, but that should be enough to make getting outside into nature a more regular habit). For additional evidence on the beneficial effects of nature for children and adolescents, (Lomax and colleagues, 2024).
2. Watching birds will inspire you to exercise. I started off my adult interest in birdwatching because a friend (Carl Kallgren) gave me a bird feeder. A lot of lovely creatures came to that feeder, including inca doves and white-winged doves, as well as English sparrows (who I have since learned are highly coadapted to live with Homo sapiens, and they thrive alongside humans in Phoenix or Los Angeles as well as they do in New York City). But that aroused my curiosity, and I now wanted to check out the less domesticated birds in my area, such as the beautiful vermillion flycatchers, gila woodpeckers, and cactus wrens, who don’t usually come to feeders. (A bit of truth in advertising, birding gets you on your feet and moving around in the sunshine and fresh air, but it is not usually aerobic, and involves a lot of standing still every time you see movement in a nearby tree. I have found that young people often find it boring and frustrating. Although it is an acquired taste, it is well worth cultivating (for reasons I will detail below).
3. You can find birds almost anywhere. Like us, many birds can survive anywhere—in suburbs and dense urban environments, like the English sparrows and rock pigeons who showed up on my New York fire escape, but:
4. Most birds really love the areas we find most beautiful. Even in New York City, there are more birds in the parks, where there are more trees, more water, and more flowers. More than 280 different bird species visit Central Park in Manhattan. I just looked at Cornell University’s Merlin app and found that the birds likely to be seen today in Central Park include Northern Cardinals, Blue Jays, American Goldfinches, and Wood Ducks. And that’s in the middle of December, no less! In the summer, there are all kinds of colorful migrants, like Wilson’s warblers, some of whom I just saw vacationing alongside me in Costa Rica. Since it sits right on a lake, 300 birds visit urban Chicago every year, including the incredibly beautiful Blackburnian warbler and the American redstart.
5. Birding will give you a psychological lift, but without a hangover. If you look online to find photos of the birds I mentioned in the last paragraph, it will give your visual cortex a lift. But unlike other activities that can give you a lift, birding is not dangerous, and it does not give you a hangover (as you’d get from a few glasses of wine), nor does it cause problems later (as might happen if you decided to seek fulfillment on Tinder or Ashley Madison). Two hours after going out to watch birds, you are likely to feel better than you did before you went out with your binoculars.
6. Birding will focus your attention on something outside of your personal problems, which can drive you crazy. Instead of worrying about those problems that keep repeating themselves on a loop inside your head, watching birds can focus you outside yourself, as you search intently for a small movement in the trees, or a hint of color that might blow up into a beautiful multi-colored display under your binoculars (from the distance, most birds look like little flashes of gray, binoculars help us see more like they do, and magically magnify their brilliant displays).
7. Birding may well increase your commitment to saving the remaining beautiful places on the planet. Given that most birds need green environments with native plants, and they thrive in wooded areas with streams of clean water, birdwatchers tend to get highly committed to saving those places.

Get a pair of binoculars* get out into the nearest park, look into the green trees and bushes, and maybe later you’ll not only feel better about your own life, but be inspired to save the world.

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