Birding is punk

Tamir Gray had been skeptical when his girlfriend invited him along to bird-watch one weekend last spring. He figured it would be boring. Gray was still in university and had been living according to the maxim that time outside was best spent being active. Still, Gray went with her to Central Park, which is a bird-watching hub due to its size and combination of woodlands, open spaces and bodies of water.

His girlfriend, who’d started birding a few months prior, had a pair of binoculars, and, shortly after they set out, something came over Gray: “I don’t know what exactly it was, but I just — the entire time that we were there, I was like, ‘I want to hold the binoculars,’” he said.

Gray became a birder overnight and has been frequenting Tompkins Square Park during migration seasons ever since. Early on weekend mornings, Gray and a few other regulars are out in the park, listening for birdsong before it’s overpowered by the thrum of trucks and music, gazing up at the branches before much of the East Village wakes.

Tompkins Square Park is minuscule and less popular for birding compared to the 843-acre Central Park, but it’s convenient and perfectly sufficient for Gray, who isn’t always vying for the rarest bird.

“I always have more fun when I just am able to appreciate whatever it is that I see than when I’m looking for one bird in particular,” Gray said. In Tompkins this spring, he saw a variety of warblers, some Northern Parulas and a pair of Red-tailed Hawks that mate in the park.

Gray’s unexpected plunge into the world of birding is becoming more common. In the past few years, young people — and not necessarily birdy or nerdy ones — have taken to the parks of New York City to catch a glimpse of the birds. Most of them, like Gray, never saw this hobby coming.

For more than 30 years, Robert DeCandido has been leading bird walks in Central Park, where he’s better known as “Birding Bob.” When DeCandido started out, those birding were generally “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” he said. Since then, DeCandido has watched that demographic diversify — notably over the past five years during and after the pandemic — as birds beckoned people outside for a safe pastime of watching, tracking, logging, and photographing their feathery swag.

A 2022 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported that there are 96.3 million bird-watchers in the United States — more than twice as many as in 2016.

Tod Winston, Urban Biodiversity Specialist and Birding Guide at NYC Bird Alliance, said that he’s enjoyed watching the local birding community change in the last decade, as he noted that his organization strives to be a welcome place for every sort — and age — of birder.

Winston also cited COVID-19 as a factor in the demographic shift. “During the pandemic, many New Yorkers discovered surprising and beautiful birds right in their local parks and backyards — and this group of new birders included many younger folks who might not normally have had the opportunity or motivation to stop and experience nature,” he said.

Emily Kozadinos, from Queens, first became interested in birding in 2022, the summer after she’d graduated high school. She was working as a lifeguard for the National Park Service in Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Her interest in birds started innocently enough: with rainy days and a deserted beach, where she had nothing to do but look out at the crop of shore birds, which included Sanderlings, American Oyster Catchers and seagulls. Once a friend, a fellow lifeguard, showed up with her bird guide, and they started identifying birds together, Kozadinos was invested.

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“I was never anti-bird,” Kozadinos said, but she hadn’t exactly foreseen her interest in birding: “It was honestly very surprising.”

Summer ended, and Kozadinos returned to Queens, bought her own copy of a North American bird guide, and got birding. She started by going to the beach at Hallet’s Cove in Astoria, where she spotted mallard ducks, geese, and eventually a swan, then she moved to Central Park, where she saw what seemed like an infinite number of different species.

“It makes me really happy, hearing and seeing birds I’ve never seen before,” Kozadinos said. “Kind of like collecting Pokémon, except instead of collecting Pokémon, I’m tabbing birds in my guide book.”

Jahlel Victor is a college student from Brooklyn who got into birding and bird photography after trying and failing to get a shot of a particularly photogenic bird during a trip to Yellowstone National Park last year; he also saw a connection between birding and his childhood interest in Pokémon. “I enjoy the chase,” he said.

Victor — whose go-to area for birding is the Ramble, a large woodland area in Central Park — posited that birding is especially accessible in New York City, somewhat ironically, because of the limited green space. For birds, the city is like a quaint, one-horse town: When it’s Saturday night (migration season), there are only so many places to go.

Winston, from the NYC Bird Alliance, made a similar point, saying that birding in New York City is particularly fruitful as millions of migrating birds — of some 350 different species — funnel into the city’s green spaces, including small neighborhood parks.

Even so, Michael Lombardo, who started birding in 2019 while living in San Francisco and moved to Brooklyn in 2021, was surprised at how many birds he was seeing when he started frequenting McGolrick Park, a small park in Greenpoint. Lombardo began leading bird walks the weekend after quitting his tech job in 2023, and soon formed the McGolrick Bird Club with “a vibe shift in mind.”

Lombardo said that he hadn’t set out to create a younger bird club, necessarily, just a less birdy bird club. He noted that he knew of several local birding groups with young people, but, in his opinion, they tended to attract those with a high — and somewhat unrelatable — fervor for birds.

Still, the club and its online presence are recognizably young, full of timely puns (bat summer, anyone?) and of the (Ella Emhoff) moment (see: waitlist for crocheted balaclavas).“I want to dress birding up in its most regal plumage, and I want people to understand that birding can be for them,” Lombardo said.

Lombardo truly believes that birding is what people are meant to be doing: “In my aspirationally poetic moments, I call it a festival of noticing,” he said. “We are doing something that’s like, quasi-pagan . . . we’re gathering together outside and we’re paying reverence to the natural world.”

Lombardo likes to say that birding is punk — as a joke, but one that he believes in fully. “The dominant culture is so screen-obsessed and superficial and into virtual realities and numbing out and chasing likes or chasing this. Birding is a practice where you are just sitting with your body in the real world — that is punk as f**k,” Lombardo said. “So that’s the energy that I try to capture.”

Max St. John, a comedian based in Brooklyn, was pleasantly surprised when he had inadvertently inspired people to try birding. He posted a series of short-form videos on social media in which he told viewers to “come with me as a 32-year-old hungover bird-watcher in New York.”

St. John went birding for the first time last year in Prospect Park. In St. John’s second video, he narrates, “It’s cold this morning, but it feels refreshing because 2 a.m. Taco Bell made me sweat all night.” He zooms in on a branch, “What do you think, Red-winged Blackbird?”

Like many other birders, St. John feels excited when he sees a species he’s never seen before and appreciates being more attuned to his surroundings — that is, most of the time: “This is kind of a joke,” St. John started, saying that one shouldn’t start birding unless they’re ready to think about birds, like, a lot. “I sometimes find it hard to enjoy a park hang with friends, because I’m hearing an oriole up above. So, in a way, it’s almost become debilitating and distracting.”

St. John was unique in suggesting that an interest in birds could become debilitating, but Gray and others also noted how their everyday lives have changed since getting into bird-watching. “It makes me see the city in a different way,” Gray said; he’s grown to appreciate how a place like New York City is an important environment for wildlife. “All you need to do is go outside and look around. It helps to have binoculars . . . but you don’t need binoculars to appreciate the birds around you.”