It was a bird call—a weaver, to be more specific, though I didn't know which kind. They're bright yellow birds with different variations of black masks and helmets, building ball-shaped nests from trees throughout East Africa. (I live in Nairobi, Kenya.) I searched and eventually found him. The car had stopped, and so had my mind. No grocery list, no to-do list, no admonishing myself for things undone—just a little yellow bird hanging from his nest, screaming his shrill call.
sugar. Being more mindful can make you more productive at work and better at collaborating. If you practice being mindful, it can change your body's actual response to stress, reducing how much of the stress hormone cortisol is released.
Meditating is the method by which most people tend to try and attain this body-and-mind-improving state. But counting breaths, closing your eyes and concentrating, and other meditations are difficult and sometimes unpleasant—for me and for others. While some people may argue that struggling with meditation is part of the point, it's also discouraging, and can make a mindfulness practice frustrating. And when something's frustrating, you're less likely to set aside time to do it.
David Creswell, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, says that even though it's not meditation, watching birds like this does count as mindfulness. "A lot of times we think about mindfulness or mindfulness meditation as really going deep and knowing yourself," he says, "but really it's about fostering awareness and open receptivity to your experience."
At Carnegie Mellon, Creswell studies how mindfulness training affects stress response and other mental and physical health outcomes. He says that when monks in a monastery pay attention to the sounds in the room where they are, that's mindfulness, too, though not explicitly meditation. Same for watching birds. "You're really having an explicit goal to attend to sounds. To really be attentive, that certainly counts as mindfulness," he says.
Practicing mindfulness specifically through birdwatching can also help your health: In a study published last year in the journal BioScience, scientists from The University of Exeter in England found that when people experience more birds in their daily lives, their mental health improves. They also experienced reduced prevalence and severity of depression, anxiety, and stress. Previous research has found that listening to birdsong contributes to perceived attention restoration and stress recovery.
"Mental health is hugely complex, and nature isn't a silver bullet, but there's increasing evidence that it can be an important tool—particularly for people in cities—to offset extra stressors," says Daniel Cox, a professor at the University of Exeter in the UK and the lead author of the study on vegetation and birds' effects on mental health.
But "actively paying attention" to birds doesn't mean you have to become a binoculars-toting, Latin name-spouting super-birder. That's just one type of birdwatching, says Claire Thompson, author of The Art of Mindful Birdwatching. "All of that is really interesting. It's essential for communication and science. But mindful birdwatching is watching them with your senses. You don't need any knowledge. You don't need to know the names of species."
Thompson says tuning into the songs—or the birds' colors or behavior, whichever you choose—can help provide further details that root you in the present. Since mindfulness is partly about "being" in the place you're in, it helps enhance your mindful experience.
Both Standish and Abson have found that birds enhance their travel memories. Standish, for one, remembers the first bird he really noticed in 1980, and where he was. "I can look at a harlequin duck, and I remember I first saw that at Belmont Harbor [in Chicago]," he says.
What's more, most people don't have to go anywhere to get these benefits—birds are ubiquitous, says John Rowden, director of community conservation for the Audubon Society. Birdwatchers establish what are called "sit spots" for themselves—places like their porch, backyard, or a spot in the park. When Rowden was an ornithology professor at Columbia University, he had students observe pigeons in the streets of New York. Pigeons, he adds, are each unique individuals who behave in different way; they're not just gray blobs. Each pigeon's neck, for instance, has iridescent shades of purple, pink, and green.
Over time, you might find your backyard is more fruitful than you think: Standish's Chicago story from the 1980s detailed the ever-changing ecology of his own back porch—and the 57 varieties he spotted there. Once a skeptical birdwatcher who thought it was one of the "world's dumbest ways to spend time," he now says it's kind of therapeutic for him. "I find that I love it," he says, "and that it makes me feel peaceful and calm."