As a personality scientist I love this question! My approach to birding varies day to day depending on who I’m with, my mood and health, time of year, location, weather, life and world events, etc.

Thinking about defining moment of birding that I love and remember the most I notice two central themes that differ depending on whether I am with others or alone.

1. The joy of sharing birding experiences with my family, students, and/or friends. Birding tends to be a very interpersonal and intergenerational experience for me and I am rarely out birding alone. Discovering new things together whether it is a new to us species, an interesting behavior, or a new place is often a highlight. I love the two big days our family does each migration season to support local community organizations and I adore traveling with my family to see new birds as well as traveling with students to help them discover the wonders of birds in particular and the natural world in general. I also love being out at the banding station helping with songbird or gull research - being outside with a purpose helping science and getting to be hands on with birds is truly one of my favorite things personally and to share with others. This type of birding tends to be a very active, joyful, extraverted, enthusiastic approach to birds.

2. The quietude of solo birding. While this is pretty rare these days, when I am birding on my own I find myself very present in the moment entering a flow state (one of my spark psychology concepts that hooked me into graduate study in psychology! learn more at https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness). I greatly enjoy walking my favorite route at my favorite patch (a gorgeous historic cemetery across from my office that is great for birding all year round) and just quietly noticing who is where and recognizing individual birds. Likewise, when traveling for work, I enjoy exploring new hotspots in a similar mindset though this is often bittersweet as I want to be sharing discovery with my people. I also enjoy being still and noticing details of interesting behavior.

Regardless of context, what I notice and enjoy most about birding is a shift from my brain’s default mode (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/default-mode-network) of thinking about data or emails or writing and instead being centered in the world around me.

Finally, I love that I am always birding - writing, listening to podcasts, reading memoirs, there are so many ways that I am actively appreciating birds all the time even when I’m not out looking at an actual bird!

The spark bird prompt creates the idea of retrospective nature journaling which pairs self-reflective writing and the benefits of therapeutic writing with nature journaling and the benefits associated with that activity. We can't always be out in the natural world. Sometimes we can't even stare out our window at a blustery day like I am doing now pausing to notice the woodpecker activity in the trees behind my house. Flickers really are stunners aren't they?! In these moments of disconnection from nature, we can engage in retrospective nature journaling, writing about our memories of the natural world. Informed by narrative identity research, we can write about more than just a spark moment and journey into writing about high points, low points, turning points, important characters in our stories, future scripts, and others self-defining experiences. So far as we know it is still an open question whether retrospective nature journaling has the same benefits of other therapeutic writing and nature journaling, but it is a testable hypothesis that our research team will definitely be looking into in the future!

How real are spark bird stories? That is going to vary person to person. For some folks these memories are going to be vivid, detailed accounts of a specific moment in a specific time – something of a flashbulb memory. For others they are threads of moments in time, small glimmers here and there. For many, these sparks are not a bird but a book or a person or a combination of many small moments. One spark birder shared a recording she happened to have going in the moment she saw her spark bird so we know that one is real! For others, like most memories, spark bird stories are social constructions told in specific contexts for specific reasons recalling details of past experiences. In reality, the veracity of spark bird stories doesn’t matter from the framework of narrative identity research. I mean, we don’t want stringers in spark bird stories, but aside from the random person peacocking with a spectacular first sighting or masking a “you don’t want my story, it’s just a …” story, what is important is the meaning of spark experience to the individual telling the story.