Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It’s cold, but the air is thick with city sounds: horns, traffic, occasional shouting. On Broadway, suits and tourists jostle his shoulders back and forth.
Nearby, in Bryant Park, an American woodcock stands out. Its small body, brown spotted and patterned like a snake, is the size of my fist. Its beak is flamboyantly long, extending beyond the rounded chest. She sways in a slow, rhythmic dance, her eyes dark and bright like the sky, full of stars. People watch quietly, attentively and reverently.
Birds can have this effect: they can reduce our constant chatter, offering a gateway to a quieter, calmer state of consciousness.
Many birders understand this. Birding can be a practice of paying attention, quieting your mind and being receptive to the present moment. Sometimes this is called “mindful birding.” (This contrasts with more competitive, gamified forms of birding, where birders, or “twitchers,” focus on identifying species and growing their life lists—the list of species they observe. Meanwhile, for vigilant birders, the idea is to “know the soul before we know the name,” to quote naturalist Tom Brown Jr.)
Last month I visited New York’s Zen Mountain Monastery to understand what a birder and a Buddhist might share. The monastery, hidden among the hillside trees, is deeply intertwined with this land of the Catskills. Birds weave into the life of the monastery: herons visit the lake, and owls roost in the forest.
“Just last week we heard the first birds during our morning meditation period,” says Danica Shoan Ankele, who is here, “. The wintering birds here, like the chickens, are companions in the cold, dark months. Then comes spring, with birdsong. Like chanting or meditation, birds can mark the natural rhythms that define our days. My own mornings are dedicated to the squabbles of northern cardinals.” and having breakfast in my feeder.
“When people come here, they’re often looking for quiet,” says Shoan, as our tea steams in the frosty air, not quite surrendering to spring. “It opens up different opportunities for networking and communication.” It is the same in birding. Silence clears the space in which the birds offer themselves.
“We can become so myopic in our man-made, constructed world,” Shoan smiles. “The presence of these creatures with their full, rich life breaks through this self-care.”
Nature does not reflect our narratives: it asks us to let them go, to be open. Birding, on the other hand, can – like Buddhist practice – collapse the gap between self and other. And when we begin to recognize and empathize with other beings, we begin to dissolve the perceived boundaries between us.
Nature does not reflect our narratives: it asks us to let them go, to be open.
Another Zen Mountain monk, Simon Daio Harrison, puts it with clear-eyed, Northern English objectivity. “To me, Zen practice is about relationships. If I’ve solidified myself and solidified that little warbler outside, there’s a gap between us. If I’m not careful, I’ll reject that ‘other’ or even destroy them.”
Birding is an exercise in solidification – decentralizing ourselves or dissolving the “I” completely. Throughout the Zen canon, teachers and poets have used the natural world to illustrate that we are all made of one essence. Dogen Zenji’s poems, for example, are full of natural images. “They are metaphorical,” says Shoan, “or they are offered as examples of fully embodied Buddhahood: the mountains and rivers themselves are the sutras; the sound of the streams is the song of universal praise. Here birds can shine especially brightly. By spreading their wings or singing, the bird can embody this wholeness.”
I am reminded of Dogen’s poem “Zazenshin” (Zazen’s Acupuncture Needle), found in the Shobogenzo:
Realization, neither general nor particular,
effort without desire.
Clean water all the way to the bottom;
A fish swims like a fish.
A vast sky is transparent throughout;
A bird flies like a bird.
The animals here are not just metaphors, but fully realized paradigms. “We can learn a lot from the ease with which birds are in their embodiment—so simple, so wholehearted,” says Shoan. Meanwhile, people are “contorting ourselves and trying to become who we already are.”
This revelation, when it comes, can be a great relief. Holly Merker, its founder Mindful Birding Networkhe understands that well. Once a jerk, he came to alert birding through a series of disasters: two broken spines, followed by a cancer diagnosis. During the treatment, he was forced to go birding more slowly, mainly talking to people outside his window. These birds did not parrot his narrative. “Friends and family treated me differently because my hair was falling out and my body was changing,” Holly said. “The birds didn’t judge me for who I was or what I looked like. It was an incredible gift.”
Founded in 2021, the Mindful Birding Network’s events and programs bring basic mindfulness techniques to birding more explicitly. “I usually have a local partner, like a nonprofit,” says Holly. “We’re in spaces where you can walk slowly or sit comfortably. I ask people to gently close their eyes or gaze softly, and I guide them through to tune in to the layers of sound, how the ground feels, how it breathes. Then I notice the birds as they appear…
As Daio notes at Zen Mountain, this evokes the concept of a “seat”: a place where you can sit quietly in nature, ideally near your home, where you can return to on a daily basis and be open to all wildlife (dawn and dusk are best). Exercise created by Jon Young, teacher and author What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World; in a previous life, he worked on Daio Young’s environmental education programs.
The common ground of alertness and birding may be intuitive – but scientific research is increasingly confirming it. Where Western psychology and neuroscience now study mindfulness, interest in nature-based practices such as birding has followed—and similar restorative benefits have been observed. Birding, like vigilance, seems to be improved by birders memory and neuroplasticity. And birdsong—again, like mindfulness—can improves attention and cognitive performance. You don’t have to be a dedicated birder: several studies show that just being exposed to birds has a restorative effect. A 2006 study concluded that the three most soothing sounds for humans are wind, water and birdsong. Others knit a reduced bird song tension, depression and anxiety.
The more extra-human attention and care you offer, the more you will give back. For Holly, this reciprocity is at the heart of vigilant birding. “They give us joy and attention,” he says. “However, we can support conservation and stewardship. We can plant native plants, provide food and water, and contribute to citizen science.”
The more extra-human attention and care you offer, the more you will give back.
After visiting Zen Mountain, a friend and I hiked nearby. “Look up,” my friend said halfway up the climb. A boreal owl looked down at us, silvery, wide-eyed, crystal clear. I’ve been talking about the birds all day. At that moment, it was as if they spoke back.
By cultivating inner peace, we are in a better position to protect nature. Just as Buddhist practice leads to compassion, birding can extend that compassion to nature.
The global rise of birding since Covid is impressive. Good reason: Among the outdoor activities, birding is uniquely available; Birds live in all environments, including cities. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities; By 2050, it will probably be over 68 percent. All these people live among birds. However, Over 20 percent of all bird species can live in cities. Even in urban areas where there are not many trees, hawks, starlings, doves and many blackbirds thrive.
Birding is also inclusive in other ways. It does not require great physical strength. The visually impaired can bird by ear. Projects like Project FeederWatch and Garden BirdWatch encourage birding from home. As an inexpensive activity with plenty of free knowledge online and birding groups actively expanding their efforts to promote inclusion, birding is breaking down barriers that traditionally exclude marginalized groups from nature-based activities. As with mindfulness: All you need to practice is a receptive mind.
From the waterfowl of ancient Zen poetry to the roosters of New York City, bird teachings are rarely out of reach. To observe a bird is to calm the wild storms of consciousness: to gather the mind and distill it into bird form.
Another Dogen poem comes to mind:
To what shall we compare this world?
To the moonlight dew
A crane flicked its bill.
I think he is talking about the same essential truth.
I set up camp in the Oregon woods to find two northern spotted owls a few feet away in their home tree—staring at me, a universe melting in their dark, wide eyes. I saw a bald eagle circling the treetops of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, its feathers straining against the winter sky. Reality had never felt so close as in those moments; my mind has never been so moved.
“I know nothing about consciousness,” Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki once said. “I’m just trying to teach my students how to hear birdsong.” I invite you to listen to them too.
