True Birding – An ABA Young Birders Essay

By ABA Young Birder, Madeleine Moon-Chun

“The first student who identifies twenty-five species wins a hummingbird feeder!” my soon-to-be birding mentor declared from his tiny box onscreen.

My brother and I turned to each other mischievously. It was so on. Amid the weighty paranoia of the world circa 2020, our mother had enrolled us in an asynchronous birding camp, and we, who knew nothing more than the robins of our backyard, were thrilled to end the Zoom call and venture into the wondrous outdoors.

I observed my first bird, Northern Cardinal, on June 7, falling in love with the feeling of correctly identifying a species. As seventh grade hid behind surgical masks and computer screens, I clung to that feeling of surety, my competitive spirit tantalized by the prospect of flitting treasures behind each tree. I roamed the parks around Atlanta, racking up “lifers”—birder lingo for newly encountered species—on my “life-list” like a True Birder, or so I thought.

Then the summer after ninth grade, I participated in bird banding, a catch-and-release conservation effort to record species populations, where I encountered not a lifer but a life-changer: a Pine Siskin. 

As the instructor prepared me to release the songbird, I thought about how even though I’d seen siskins in their winter flocks, I’d never taken my time to focus on a single bird—to notice how delicate patterning on its head blooms into stark brown markings on its chest.

Transformed by the experience, I was suddenly determined to bird only for conservation purposes, to protect the natural world with all I had, no competition in mind.

This, I thought, is True Birding. 

However, in the following years, I had the opportunity to rethink yet again. One morning during the bird conservation class I taught last summer, I took twenty or so of the elementary schoolers out to a nearby field. Each species I pointed out, no matter how commonplace they seemed to me—wrens, jays, phoebes—brought them tremendous exhilaration.

“So these are the birds that wake us up every morning!” the students exclaimed.

Sharing space with such enthusiastic budding birders showed me that, contrary to what my twelve-year-old self had been convinced of, there’s no one way to be a “True Birder.” 

I realized that my True Birding is both competition and conservation, contemplative and fast-paced, mundane and awe-inspiring, a solo endeavor and a community-oriented one. I realized I don’t have to choose one birding style over another, and I feel most fulfilled when they can interact in new ways, joy found not only in the diversity of birds but also in the diversity of its birders.

I soon rediscovered birding everywhere, even in airports—they do have Rock Pigeons! And I just as much embrace the days I still chase after rarities, tumbling down hills to photograph elusive lifers. 

Engaging with birders of such multifaceted practices ultimately gifted me with an invaluable insight that I carry into my life far beyond studies of the natural world: I am—we all are—an ongoing revelation, shaped equally by rare moments as by everyday ones and, most of all, those we learn from and come to love along the way.

Birding is no longer my way to escape the world or compete within it but, rather, to re-enter it, again and again, with new eyes. This world is so vast, filled with joy, change, uncertainty, and struggle. I can’t experience nearly everything, but when birding, I pause at the axis of reality and reflection and consider how content I am when embracing my own True Birding, alive in the simplest of ways.

And in turn, the world has shown me curious moments tinted beautifully by the flitting treasures I choose to look for as intently as when I focused single-mindedly on lifers. Treasure, found not in the numbers but in the wonder that cannot be quantified, only felt when I do what I love with those I love most.

We’re stronger together. Everything is.