Why do some people enjoy birding?

When scheduled to direct a trade show in San Antonio, Texas a few years ago, I organized all the details of the exposition from booth to marketing collateral. Then I shipped it all down and arranged the flight to arrive the day before and get things set up.

Anyone that has ever worked a trade show knows how stressful it can be. There always seems to be something missing with the booth, or the marketing materials get delayed in the process. Then one has to resort to discreet patch jobs with duct tape and rush to the local printers to generate handouts for booth visitors.

After three days on the job in south central Texas, well after the team had had drinks on the Riverwalk and enjoyed nightlife, I rose before dawn and walked out on the street to meet up with a woman driving a beat up car filled with the trappings of everyday life. I'd contacted her online through a San Antonio birding organization to explain that I was going to be in town for the trade show. Would she be willing to take me on an early morning birding trip outside the city?

It turned out she had special access to a preserve south of town that was not generally open to the public. We shared small talk about birding on the way down and she asked if there were any target birds on my list.

"I'd like to see a painted bunting," I told her.

"Oh, we'll get you one of those, almost sure," she replied.

The bird called a painted bunting looks just like it's name. As shown in the picture above, the bird has a bright plumage that seems to have fallen out of an artist's bin. Bright blue and green and scarlet feathers adorn its body.

We pulled into the parking lot and I stepped out of the car to stretch. At that precise moment a semi-familiar song erupted from the top of a tree beside the car. I stepped back with binoculars in hand and stared up at a painted bunting, a "lifer" on my bird list for sure.

Back home in Illinois we only have indigo buntings, which are also beautiful, but not so colorful or vivid as the painted bunting. In other parts of the country, there are species known as lazuli bunting, which sport a bright blue head and back with an orange-tinted breast.

Each of these birds is a unique representative of a geographic location in this country. The same holds true for every species of birds. There are nearly 700 species of them that can be found in the territory of the United States. That means birders truly "know" they are somewhere unique when traveling. Even the songs of birds such as the great-tailed grackles creaking and groaning in the tree of San Antonio are exotic signs for an Illinois boy visiting Texas.

Of course, the same unique qualities of birds entertain people traveling abroad as well. When my fiance and I visited Great Britain we went for a run on the paths around Oxford. It was April, and birds were everywhere in the hedgerows. Most delightfully, we right away encountered a small gray-blue and orange bird called a robin. The robins of Europe are quite different from those found in the United States. We stood transfixed under a small bush as a robin sang its rambling, bright song above us.

One after another, the calls and sight of English birds caught our attention. Now granted, she is not the devoted birder I am. But there was joy for her in seeing those birds because they marked part of the difference in our sense of place.

Later in the week, during our walk through the grounds of Blenheim Palace in the English countryside, we noticed birds on the lakes called Great Crested Divers. They are big water birds with protruding facial structures. It was April and the birds were migrating to their breeding grounds, so their coloration was rich and their behavior animated with the hormones of the season.

In the hedgerows along the canal paths sang a variety of small birds called tits, and full-bodied birds called bullfinches. These I'd seen in books for decades but never dreamed of an opportunity to encounter in real life.

Walking those paths with birds singing brought a special connection to the grounds where Winston Churchill once ran and played. I tried to imagine my own life if I had grown up in Britain. With my English roots, this was not an impossibility. Would I have become a birder growing up in England? Almost surely, I would.

Churchill likely heard the songs of these same birds all those years ago. His devotion to the place formed the emotional foundations resistance to all who would invade his homeland. But here's the difficult truth in being a birder. To those of us who claim a sense of place in recognizing birds everywhere we go, there is a sense of 'homeland' that perhaps we appreciate, and that those who willingly ignore birds do not.

Which is what makes it difficult to watch the world suffer under the selfish aims of human beings all too willing to sacrifice the long-term beauty of creatures evolved to teh landscape in exchange for the short-term, often selfish claims placed upon the land that ravish so much only to fade away once the resources are exhausted.

This is what Rachel Carson wrote long ago when she penned Silent Spring. Imagine a world without the songs of birds to enrich our lives. The silence would be chilling. The emptiness profound. And that is why some of us get anxious and angry about the way in which people so dismissively treat the world in the name of their business, their religion or their nation.

Here in America, we know well what it means to drive wild things to extinction. In the span of a couple decades, the human race hunted and badgered the species known as the Passenger Pigeon into total extinction. Before that, the Great Auk and the Heath Hen. The Carolina Parakeet and Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

All were silenced forever. Formerly they marked a true sense of place. But that was the exact nature of their problem. When human beings erased their habitats, the birds could no longer survive.

But birders appreciate those relationships in the moment. They keep a sense of wonder and joy in everyday encounters with species of birds that others so unremarkably ignore. Birding is not a religion, but it acts like one in a crucial sense. It celebrates creation with sanctity and awareness. That is perhaps one of the most significant things a human being can do in their lifetime.

Christopher Cudworth is a naturalist, artist and writer. He is working on a pair of books titled "Nature is My Country Club" and "Sustainable Faith."