I have always felt attracted to birds from a purely philosophical perspective: After reading the ancient Persian Sufi epic The Conference Of The Birds by Farid Uddin Attar, the idea that birds were creatures of high spirituality was planted in my mind – and left to sprout in secrecy. The first time I felt excitement watching a bird was when I almost stumbled over a hoopoe, the flamboyant leader of the Conference, in a public park in Dubai. I was instantly mesmerized by its beauty, the intricacy of its plumage and elegant elusiveness.
In the years since this first hoopoe sighting, my passion for birds grew and I would not content myself with the chance-encounter anymore, but was prepared to venture further into nature and solitude, invest in binoculars and photo-equipment, in long distance migration and bird books. I grew into a full a full-fledged birder.
Most of my friends take birding for the epitome of my eccentricity. To them birder sounds about as exciting as stampcollector. But they don’t have the slightest idea about birds: Birds aren’t beautiful things one collects in a photo album, a quaint old-fashioned romanticism. Birds are wild, untamed creatures, and some of them are outright dangerous.
In 1932, for example, Australia, armed to their teeth with machine guns, went to war against the belligerent indigenous population of the Emus. Hostilities went on for a month until the Australians yielded defeat. The Great Emu War of 1932 was won by the Emus.
Or, a birding trip might easily lead into disaster, as happened to me a couple of months ago, when in search for hoopoes in the African Savanna, my jeep got stuck and I found myself tracking by foot through big 5 country, facing buffaloes and elephants, who were only scared away by the firing of a gun. Buffalo or Emu, who’s the bigger badass now?
All things taken into consideration, the b-word might soon sound as hot as free rock climbing.
There are many noble things to be said about birding: it sharpens eyesight, when staring motionless into verdant nature for hours on end, and hearing, when listening for the tweet-tweet-tweet, hooh-hooh, che-che-che-che, the rattling and the hissing. It turns upright citizens into valient ecological activists when the habitat of birds is endangered. And it teaches patience and humility, when the one bird one had set out to watch simply never shows up. Or no bird at all shows up.
But most importantly, birding makes people treasure the moment. In this world of instant gratification, of phony vanity and virtual reality, the sighting of a creature of pure and honest beauty is nothing less than a blessing.
