Program Meeting: The Birding Effect! Birding as an Introduction to Nature

Look up, look around, birds are everywhere from city sidewalks to country roads and every stop over site in between. With birds being available to see it comes as no surprise that they can lead to the gateway of having passion for nature. There’s no special tools required to view birds, though some do help with the effort. But essentially you can go out and view birds with Just your eyes. This makes birding an accessible introduction into nature, that along with the fact that you do not have to go deep in the woods to see birds opens birding up to communities that have reasons to fear or avoid rural and heavily forested green spaces.   Birding allows for slow introduction into these areas and breaks down those walls associated with green spaces being off limits. It also opens up the mind to areas of natural resources outside of birds. Birds are connectors both in the natural resource sense as well as the human dimensions. Birds are on every continent and take up multiple types of locomotion from flying to running, and swimming.