Here’s why everyone on your feed suddenly birds

For Captain Ahab it was a white choice. For quint from “jaws” it was a big white shark. For Bonner BlackIt was one Rose spoonA wading bird with light pink plumage and a long beak similar to a piece of cutlery. The Nashville-based musician drove on the back of Costa Rica a few months ago, her eyes fixed on the surrounding greenery, when her friend in the driver’s seat exclaimed “Flamingo!” Before she knew it, Black had jumped out of the moving car and just caught a passing glimpse of Roseate Spoonbill – not even long enough to raise his phone for an image – before it flew off.

“I love that it was so I saw it because I only got it for a second, a perfect second,” she tells Popsugar. “That’s how moments are, that’s how time works. Soak in life as it comes and then releases it.”

Black is similar to only the famous literary hunters to the extent that her obsession has driven her to some light madness, at least enough to jump out of a moving vehicle. But unlike Ahab and Quint, she is not looking for blood. In fact, on the contrary. She is part of a growing movement by amateur bird watchers, and she is one of this new generation’s brightest stars. Her bird videos, which collected 15 million views over platforms in 2024, have helped to transform a healthy (if otherwise overlooked) This year’s hot girl hobby.

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Corina Newsome is a wildlife biologist and a conservation researcher at National Wildlife Federation.

Now it may be because I am a nerd, but recently my feed has been flooded with bird content. I am browsing through informative rants about Bird dialectsThe freak-outs about blocked owlsThe Hungover visits at Shorebird festivalsand Best friends who interrupt their sexcapadrecaps with excited bird spotting – As everyone has given me, flickering with joy in an otherwise frightening and depressing digital landscape. I have also noticed something with the videos I get to serve: no one has David Attenborough Lookelikes (God loves him). They are made by creators who are at least 60-70 years younger, usually quite fun and sometimes very wonderful.

The Birding act to look at, listening to and sometimes traces birds in nature-has long been regarded as a hobby for well-being and a form of leisure time that has a small “geriatric color”, which blackly puts it. But bird watching changes, thanks to the internet and social media and even pandemic, a period that saw a wave of enthusiasm for bird watching among people who have otherwise never had the time or motivation to deepen their intimacy with the natural world. And the momentum has not slowed down.

Black first began bird watching as a joke, how someone can absorb underwater weaving or fencing. She had recently started creating music and content full -time and juggling brand agreements on social media while also breastfeeding a broken heart after a poor division. She felt burnt out and passionate and wondered if she could joke back to Stasis by trying the most random hobby she could think of. So she bought a $ 40 -pair binoculars and a Bird book in Tennessee, “and within a month I was just addicted to the hunt,” she says. “I feel I got my spark back from bird watching.”

Now her online persona is a mixture of touring musicians, eager birdwatches and bird memel words, often combines all three by integrating bird excursions into her music tournament schedule. She is equally likely that it is in nature and takes fans on exclusive bird -related hikes before or after her show, as she is on tiktok and instagram and asks people questions like Which birds would they not let their sister datas.

It is online where bird watching has really taken off. There are thousands of birds Facebook and Reddit Groups full of threads where people discuss a shared love for birds and fight each other over specific bird identifications. Birder Romance has even appeared as the latest niche category of romantic fiction and “Birding with benefits” novelwas recently Picked by Hallmark. (According to Black, it has some amazing X-rated scenes.)

Some bird -viewing affinity groups have been around for several years. Black Birders WeekFor example, was started in 2020, after one notorious confrontation in Central Park led to a white woman wrongly accused prominent black birder Christian Cooper to threaten her life. Atlanta-based conservation researchers Corina Newsome Join the formation of the first summit and still participate every year when she can.

Newsome knows the feeling of being underestimated and incorrectly assessed in a bird watching because of her gender, skin color and age. During the early days of her career, she was often the youngest and only non-white person in her cohort. “People would question my knowledge a lot,” she reminds.

Lots of more inclusive bird watching groups have appeared since the Christian Cooper incident, she tells Popsugar, “to give a space where you are not the only one of your identity and where you can feel comfortable asking questions that can be perceived as a beginner.” For, she adds, “If birds knew how elitist people were about looking at them, these people would be embarrassed.”

When I picked her up, Newsome had just finished a stint as a guest educator at a summer camp in Colorado where she used bird watching to teach black children aged 14 to 17 “The importance of identifying living things in their surroundings.” It was her fourth summer in the camp, and every year she says the teens are “obsessed.” This year’s children were particularly fascinated by her lesson on hummingbirds and how They can migrate All the way from Mexico or even longer. “Looking at birds connects you to the rest of the world, wherever you are,” she says.

As a biologist, Newsome sees the widespread popularity of bird watching as not only a conservation gain but a social justice. Birds, regardless of their “skill” or levels of commitment, are citizens. Each time they log a bird they see – whether they use Merlin Bird Identification App or EbirdTwo bird watching databases run by Cornell University – they collect data that trained researchers such as Newsome can then use to write grants or control additional resources to where these birds are found, whether it is a Nebraskan or a city block in Atlanta.

“Professionals that I use this tasks to find out where to go, so if our communities do not have data we skip them,” she explains.

Of course, not all birds are diligent noteholders who intend to discover a whole new species or in any way reverse climate change with a couple of binoculars and a dream. And in fact, says Newsome, a large part of why bird watching is so popular now is because of its simplicity. “If you like to watch and listen to birds, you’re a bird,” she says. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. “Personally, I’m constantly in a state of bird watching. I bird every time I can see or hear outside.”

Still, she believes that bird watching can actually change the world, especially when we live through what she calls “an environmental situation.” “The increase in the popularity of the birds gives me a lot of hope, because people record what they see, and many of these new birds live in cities,” she says. Cities are home to a surprising amount of wildlife and will play an important role when climate change is aggravated. The more we optimize cities for biodiversity, she says, the more we invest in tree coverage and shade and even things such as restoration of coastline and flood management-all important infrastructure for city housing as well. “The more we record where these (birds) are, the more these things become lit.”

So yes, bird watching is a powerful tool for climate elasticity and breeding dish. But that’s just. . . Really fun. For Newsome, “It’s like a treasure hunt, there is a dopamine hit,” especially during the migration season, when you are obliged to discover some unexpected critters.

Black feels the same way. She is what they call in Birding World for a “lister”, a playful derogatory term for someone who is obsessed with a list of every bird they have ever seen. “Last year I saw 304 species. This year I go for 350,” she tells me.

It is the energy-the all-in-feeling-that immediately got her connected when she first started bird all these years ago. “If anything, being in the bird community has reminded me of how much we are all kindergarten in heart,” she says. “We just want to be accepted, we just want to be happy about something. We’ve all wondered.”

Emma Glassman-Hughes (She/her) is an associated editor at PS Balance. During her seven years as a reporter, her beats have extended over the lifestyle spectrum; She has covered art and culture for Boston Globe, sex and relationships for cosmopolitan and food, climate and agriculture for ambrook research.