All the Cool Kids Are Birding - The Atlantic

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Not long before the sun rose on a Saturday in May, five men in their mid-20s were standing alongside an unassuming wetland in New Jersey, searching for birds. Ryan Zucker, a 23-year-old who could do an impressive impersonation of an eastern screech owl, had just taken a small branch to the eye, but still the group was exuberant.<br>Since midnight, they’d heard that owl, a common gallinule, and—after following some freight-rail tracks through the dark—the high-pitched, near-electronic trill of a sedge wren, the first recorded in Sussex County in 13 years. (A police officer had asked what exactly they thought they were doing on the tracks at 2 a.m., but took “We’re looking for birds” as answer enough.) In the previous 10 minutes, they had seen a sandhill crane raise its head above the reeds, watched a mallard chase an otter away from her ducklings, and heard a brown thrasher in the distance.<br>Each species put the five men one notch closer to being the repeat championship team in the World Series of Birding, a 24-hour contest to identify as many species as possible, by eye or ear, throughout New Jersey. The birds would start singing in earnest soon, and to cover the state before midnight came again, the guys needed to leave, now.<br>As one, the men—called ***mega (pronounced star-star-star-mega, or Team Mega if you can’t be bothered)—took off sprinting toward their van. William von Herff, a fast-talking 26-year-old originally from Canada, told me that he took up running ahead of his first World Series, in 2024. He needed to be sure he could race into a bog, then control his heart rate enough to sense the drumming of a ruffed grouse’s wings.

Birding has historically been the domain of the AARP crowd, but in the World Series, young people have an edge. And these days, birders in their 20s (and 30s and 40s) are showing up not just at birding competitions, but seemingly everywhere. Some of my friends who, like me, are in their early 30s now bring binoculars on vacation; so do a number of my sister’s friends, who are younger and cooler than mine. Young birding influencers are all over TikTok and Instagram. The National Audubon Society had 10 college chapters in 2019; today, it has 117. South by Southwest hosted its first bird lovers’ meetup last year and its first birding panel in March.<br>Andrew Marden, the 27-year-old who drove ***mega’s van, has been competing in the World Series since age 15, and he told me that only in the past few years have people his age started perking up when he mentions his hobby. Oh, that’s really cool, they might say. Some have even said they wanted to go birding too.

Virtually all of the 20 or so birders and bird-adjacent professionals I spoke with attributed the shift to two watershed events. The first is the coronavirus pandemic: At a moment when many Americans spent far too much time anxiously bouncing around their own home, birding represented a low-stress, low-screen, outdoor activity that could be done without travel.<br>The second is a revolution in birding tech. Birders have always used the newest tools available to them, whether vinyl records of bird calls, rare-bird hotlines, or push notifications. (***mega is lingo for an ultrarare species noted on eBird, a forum where birders report sightings.) But soon after the bird-identification app Merlin introduced Sound ID, a sort of Shazam for bird calls, in 2021, millions of people started using the app, including the 29-year-old Super Bowl champion Sam Darnold and the 33-year-old pop star Ariana Grande.<br>Merlin and similar tools have upended the culture of birding. Ten years ago, aspiring birders had little choice but to learn from the old-timers, who might be less than cool or less than welcoming. Jessica Wills, a 43-year-old birder who works in the restaurant industry in Tucson, Arizona, told me that older birders have sometimes walked up to her to explain things she already knows, or rudely corrected beginner birders when they make a mistaken ID. The apps have freed new birders to learn a good deal on their own. Instead of memorizing birds’ sounds and physical appearances, you can start a Merlin recording, see what songs it picks up, see what the birds singing them look like, and then try to locate them in your binoculars. And instead of staking out bird habitats for days on end in the hopes of seeing an elusive species, you can browse bird sightings on Discord or eBird. Several people I interviewed described birding as akin to Pokémon Go. (Really, Pokémon Go is a knockoff of birding.)<br>With or without an app, the basic activity is the same: You spend hours and hours standing around, straining your eyes and ears, and you get to know a lot about birds. If you’re really dedicated, you also get to know “habitats within the habitats, the very specific ways in which birds behave and when they’re active, and what sounds they might make, and what times of day are best,...