The Current - Why Ed Yong thinks birding is ‘quietly radical’

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Ed Yong has “birder derangement syndrome,” a condition that’s entirely made up but may be familiar to other birding enthusiasts. In a conversation from last spring, the science writer tells Matt Galloway how the joy of birding saved him from pandemic burnout and radically changed how he interacts with nature.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Ed Yong also has a passion for birds. He's a science writer and birder. His new book is a young reader's edition of his bestselling book, An Immense World. It's about the natural world that surrounds us. And he won a number of prizes and received great acclaim for this book. I spoke with Ed Yong last spring about his new love for birding.

Here's our conversation. Have you seen any birds of note today? I can see some house finches feeding off the bird feeder in my backyard. And I was woken up at 3 a.m. by our local very loud mockingbird. You've been recording the number of birds that you are seeing. How many are you up to now? What's the number at? seeing. How many are you up to now? What's the number at? Will Barron Hang on, let me get you an actual number. I do have a list. So it's about 450, roughly. Thank you. Yeah, it's a lot, right? I think that

keeping a tally of the number is, of course, one way to go about it. But I think what I really enjoy about birding is everything beyond just the numbers and the list-keeping. It's been phenomenal for my mental health. It has tripled the time I spent outdoors. It has completely changed the way I interact with and appreciate the natural world. It really has been a completely transformative hobby that makes nature feel so much more accessible, so much more poignant, and just so much closer to my daily life than it has ever been before. And I'm a science writer who's written about the animal kingdom for as long as I've written about anything. And yet, this has just radically changed how I interact with it. How did you fall into this? So I moved from DC to California, to the Bay Area in May, and then a bunch of things happened

in quick succession. I walked into my house for the first time and saw an Anna's Hummingbird perched on a tree in the backyard. One of my good friends, Jenny O'Dell, who's an incredible author, lent me a copy of her field guide. She had so generously and thoughtfully annotated it with all her favourite birds, like which ones I would be most likely to see. I downloaded an app called Merlin which identifies the songs of birds in real time and I would take it for walks around my neighborhood while I was walking my dog or on heights and you know marveled at just being able to know who was around. Knowing birds on I think gives you this glorious feeling of extending the scope of your senses and your awareness. And all of these factors together just created this

little itch that I then had to scratch by going out to places specifically with the intent of looking at birds. And that's the moment where I think I really became a birder. Can you describe that moment you write about going out to a wetland near your home? Yeah, there's a site called Arrowhead Marsh. It's mainly a wetland but it has lots of different habitats as well. You know, currently I can go out there and with not too much effort over about an hour and a half see maybe 50, 60 species. But on that day, I went to the site and walked out onto a pier and sat on this boardwalk

looking over this grassy marshland. I saw a great blue heron, I heard marsh wrens calling in the reeds. I saw a red-necked phalarope, it's a type of wetland bird that sits in the water and spins in circles to stir up insects, which it then eats. And I had this incredible sense of charm and tranquility. It's been a rough several years for, I think, all of us. My head is almost always swarming with thoughts, with my ears, with my eyes. It was just such an intensely meditative experience. I tried meditating before with varying degrees of success, but this felt more meditative than meditating. All the clamor in my head just dropped out and I just felt there.

And that is the sensation that I still get all the time in birding. The world falls away and it's possible to see that as an escape from reality, but I actually think of it as an immersion in the true reality. Here is the natural world. It is all around us. One gets so caught up in all the ridiculous minutiae of everyday life and you forget that this incredible expanse of nature exists. And I think being able to really pay attention to it is wonderful and really life-changing. If I think of things like birding, the things that give me joy and expand my world as just a sidebar to my work, which is how I judge my worth, then I will always be at breaking point. It made me realize that I needed to create time for these activities that actually are not the sidebar for a fulfilled

life but their very essence. And creating a contrast between that that brings you joy and what you refer to as kind of ceaseless production. Yeah, I sort of for the longest time defined myself according to how much I was writing. During the height of the pandemic, I was writing, you know, a three to five thousand word feature every couple of weeks. Now, I'm proud of that work, but it, you know, that got me to a place where I wanted to re-evaluate how I thought about what makes me whole and what gives my life meaning. Birding gives me a lot of that. It gives me a connection to nature, it gives me a sense of community.

In Oakland, a local bird had found a Cassin's sparrow at a local site. Now this is a bird that's found in the southwest. It had to that date never been recorded in the East Bay before. It is, even by sparrow standards, a drab bird. It is a grey and brown bird. It has a beautiful voice, but it's very rare in these parts. And dozens of local birders flocked to this site to look at this bird, and many of whom, even people who'd been birding for like decades, were seeing this species for the first time. And I think just to be part of that communal sense of joy, to find so much wonder in an animal that looks so innocuous and so mundane to the average

eye was an incredible experience. I think it's sort of easy to roll one's eyes at people losing their minds over a tiny grey-brown sparrow. But I've spent a long chunk of my professional life scrolling endlessly through takes and thoughts on Twitter and what have you. And I can tell you which of those two activities feels more ludicrous to me, and it's definitely not the one with the sparrow. I think a lot of us have had that idea that we're squeezing the joy and wonder into the remaining parts of our life, and that we wish we could find more moments for joy and wonder. When you were able to do that, when you were intentional about carving out that time, what did you find about yourself? AC Yeah, I found that I was happier. I became less anxious, asleep better. There's so much

about birding we can talk about. I think so much of the world around us contracts our experience. And I think birding is exactly the opposite. Birding is expansive. It makes me look into treetops. It allows me to hear and work out who is there over large distances. You know, it connects me to millions of years of evolutionary time. And there's something just actually quietly radical about the simple act of spending a lot of your day just looking up.

You know, I spend hours of every day outside in the sun, gazing into treetops or into the distance. And I cannot tell you how transformative that feels. It feels like such an antidote to a lot of the things that are ailing us right now. I don't know about you, but I certainly feel like almost all of my close friends are struggling right now, or at least at the very least going through a period of serious introspection. Like, what is my place in the world? How do I navigate this society whose institutions fail us at every turn?

Like, how do I make meaning amidst the chaos? And my answer is not just, well, go birding, right? But that's part of it. It's about feeling connected to the natural world, taking time for yourself, looking up, listening. It's about all of that. I want to note that this is a pretty privileged reality, right? I am now a freelancer, basically. I have complete control of my hours, so I can go birding if I want to. I think most people don't have that freedom and that opportunity, But I would say that despite that, being intentional about this stuff is still very possible.

Sometimes friends ask me, like, when do you go birding? And the answer is kind of all the time, right? Like I am birding right now while we're having this talk. I can see house finches in my feeder. I can see an anise hummingbird doing courtship displays in the yard across the street. I can see a California tohi foraging in my garden. And it's very easy to think that nature is largely inaccessible to us. You know, I've just listed a bunch of backyard birds, which are very easy to spot here in Oakland. And I remember when

Jenny first gave me her field guide, looking through it and thinking, there's no way I'll see a golden eagle or a white-winged scouter in it. These are birds that are in the field guide for completion sake. There's no chance a random guy who lives in the city is going to see these. But I've seen golden eagles, loggerhead trike, sandhill cranes. I've been sat in a forest that's like 10 minutes from my house in the dead of night listening to four species of owls hooting at each other. So much of what I thought would never be accessible to me is actually easily accessible. It's just about creating time and finding those opportunities. I think it is easier than ever to do that because of

tools like Merlin, because of sites like eBird. eBird is a place where I and most other serious birders log their sightings. It's about two things, like firstly creating the time and the space for it in your life and also getting over this sort of mental block that this is silly or hard. I think we eternalize this idea that nature is distant from us. But no, the natural world is everywhere. And I think understanding that and being able to tap into it has just changed my life. And I hope it can do that for other people who are trying to work out what to do with the moment. What are you looking for in the spring migration? Yeah. I had a really great day yesterday. I saw my first bollocks, Oriole, the lazuli, buntings, western tanagers will be back,

calliope hummingbirds with their beautiful streaked throats. I hope to see all of them. Many of the species I'm very familiar with now are busting out these songs that I've never heard before. I got to hear a Ruby Crown Kinglet do its cool chip song for the first time. It was just blown away. They have a breeding plumage that I've never seen. A lot of the shorebirds, the loons, the grebes are just now decked out in fancy colors when they were mostly grays and browns for most of the winter.

colors when they were mostly grays and browns for most of the winter. And I think that's part of it too, right? the lengthening or the shortening of the days. But I now have the sense that, oh, you know, this is the week when ash-throated flycatchers are going to start showing up again. You know, this is the week when the ruddy ducks get their bright blue bills. And that's part of appreciating nature on just a much finer scale than before. I'm delighted to talk to somebody who is also suffering from, as you said, Burdur Derangement Syndrome. It feels like a pretty good place to be. Ed Yong, what a pleasure. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and bestselling author.

You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.