Birding Your Way to Well-Being

Red-bellied woodpecker

Source: Josh Bartok/used with permission

Like many people during the height of the Covid pandemic, I discovered birding and have continued to grow my interest and enjoyment since 2020. Besides noticing mental health and mood benefits myself, others have regularly shared articles with me about the benefits of birding. Most recently, conservation biologist Nils Peterson and colleagues (2024) conducted an experimental study in which college students were randomly assigned to a control condition (receiving no specific instructions), a nature-walk condition (instructed to take a specific walk through nature at least once a week), or a birdwatching condition (take the same walk and notice how many birds you see using a phone app). Students who noticed birds on their walk reported significant increases in positive emotion and significant decreases in distress compared to the other two conditions. These findings indicate that there’s something specific about looking for birds (or at least looking for elements in nature) that leads to mental health improvements.

As Peterson and colleagues note, demonstrating that birding enhances mental health does not tell us why birding has this effect—and determining the underlying reasons could help us identify ways to interact with birds (or other aspects of nature) that can heighten this positive impact. The authors refer to environmental psychologist Melissa Marselle and colleagues’ (2021) conceptual model of how biodiversity may benefit human health to identify potential explanations for their findings. Several of these potential mechanisms resonate with my own experience and I hope my sharing them may help you to find ways of enhancing your well being.

Reducing stress

Environments that are interesting, pleasant, and calming can reduce our physiological arousal, and also enhance positive emotions. Walking in an area with plants, flowers, trees, and water with a focus on looking for birds is very different from my typical daily environment and activities. Although I can certainly feel sad, angry, or stressed while I’m out birding, I also notice that my breath slows down a bit and that I regularly experience moments of joy or calm as I notice a bird, or a flower, or a beautiful vista. The sounds of birds and smell of flowers also elicit positive emotions that can buffer any painful emotions I might be experiencing. For me, it’s important that I not try to get rid of any negative feelings or stress I have; I just allow the additional experiences from birding to add to those feelings, which naturally changes them or makes them less overwhelming.

Restoring attention

Our fast-paced, overstimulated daily lives challenge our attentional capacities. Many of us find ourselves easily distracted by external stimuli or by our own thoughts and feelings. Sustained attention is like strength in a muscle, with the same “use-it-or-lose-it” qualities. When we allow our attention to be continually pulled by internal or external stimuli, our attentional abilities weaken. Marselle and colleagues (2021) note that our attentional abilities can be restored both when we are away from our everyday tasks and demands and also when the environment attracts our attention without effort, which is known as fascination. When I am at a wildlife refuge, or even an urban park, with the goal of viewing and identifying birds, I find that sounds, sights, and movement naturally grab my attention and it is much easier for me to disengage from worries or rumination (and the pull of my phone). As I’ve stated in earlier posts, being able to bring attention and awareness to our experience is an essential part of recognizing distressing emotions, taking meaningful, rewarding actions, and being compassionate toward others. Restoring our attentional capacities while we look for birds may help us to use our attention more effectively and mindfully in the rest of our lives.

Transcendent experiences

When I spend time watching birds flutter, fly, swoop, hop, eat, dive, and interact, I often experience a sense of awe, and a sense of humility. In his book, Awe: The new science of wonder and how it can transform your life, psychologist Dacher Keltner explains that awe can transform us by “quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.” This description resonates with my experience of birding: I feel smaller in some positive way, and less attached to some sense of my own importance, when I am in the midst of different habitats of birds, observing their behaviors. And I also feel more connected, more aware of how I am part of the larger whole of the world. When I’m able to carry that feeling back into my daily life, I am more able to let go of frustrations and irritations when they inevitably arise and notice moments of connectedness and joy.

Social connectedness

Although birding can be a solitary activity, birders (even solo birders) often encounter one another. This has been an unexpected benefit for me and an unexpected joy. When a rare bird has been sighted at a place we often visit, we will typically run into several individuals, pairs, or groups of people in search of the same bird, and we’ll often greet and check in with each other about it. And when we run into someone on a path who has seen something interesting, they are always eager to tell us about it and tell us how to find the unusual bird they just saw. Similarly, I also enjoy sharing an exciting sighting with others—such as when I unexpectedly discovered a nearby barred owl on a boardwalk path in Acadia National Park. I was overjoyed to quietly (and awedly) point it out to each person who came along, until there was a line of 12 people gazing through their binoculars, sharing in the experience of awe, without bothering the beautiful owl. The camaraderie of shared experience and genuine sympathetic joy in other people’s joy is a partial antidote to the sense of isolation and conflict that we often experience online or in other contexts. Reminders of shared humanity can feel restorative.

So, is there something you can do in the next week to reduce your stress, enhance your attention, elicit a sense of awe, or promote social connection? Perhaps take a walk and look for birds!

With thanks to Josh Bartok for editing help.