How Watching Birds Can Help the Earth and You

Once upon a time, everyone knew the names of the local birds. Then as humans migrated from rural areas to cities, that knowledge was lost in time. Now for most in modernized countries, nature is foreign territory. The birds are nameless, with the exceptions of crows, robins, sparrows, and a few others.

I was in that camp until my second year of college when I took Glenn Moffat’s “Natural History of California.” At the beginning of the birding unit, the binoculars in hand, our class headed up to the rolling green hills behind Foothill College for our first field trip. I was astonished that those little brown birds I had seen all my life now through binoculars were so distinctive in color, patterns (and song). By the time we spotted a lazuli bunting, shimmering iridescent blue in the sun, I was hooked. All those gulls on the coast- there were…