Your spark bird story is the story of the bird/moment/experience that got you hooked on birding. Your spark bird memory likely stands out to you as a specific event or incident that occurred at a particular time and place that you have thought about often. It may stand out to you for a particular reason - perhaps it was especially good, particularly vivid, important, or memorable, or occurred during a challenging time in your life. It is likely a memory that you remember clearly and that still feels important to you even as you think about it.

Please be elaborate in your telling of this experience. But also don't feel like you have to answer each of these questions or in this order - they are just ideas to get you started! What was your spark bird? Did you see it in person or learn about it in a field guide, video, podcast, work of art, lecture, etc.? What happened? Where were you? What was the setting like? How did you come to be there? Were you alone or with others? If you were with others, who was with you and what, if any, was their role in your experience? What were you thinking and feeling in the moment? Why do you think this particular experience was a spark bird moment for you? What does it say about you, your connection to others, and/or your understanding of the world? 

Tell your story in your voice as you might to a friend while you are driving back from a morning of birding or waiting for spring. 

• Adapted from the self-defining memory (Singer & Blagov, 2002) and life story interview key memory (McAdams, 2007) prompts. 

I was born loving birds, I can't remember a time I did not love birds. [age 0]

Hedy B.

It's a bit petty, but one sister of mine seemed to know a lot about birds and I got jealous and wanted to know as much! I started looking at backyard birds and in nearby parks, got a bird guide, signed up on some birding websites so I could learn more. I joined a birding challenge that led me to different parks and I learned about different birds in the area. My really great finds were a scarlet tanager (I was so excited!) and a very rare, for my part of the country, Ibis and then a Spoonbill. These were really exciting finds for me! I'm still learning and gaining knowledge, thanks to some sibling rivalry!  [age 42]

Alida Franco

My spark bird experience can be described as twofold: both experiences occurring about 20 years apart. someone had suggested a trip to Monte Vista, Colorado to view the sandhill cranes, which was something previously unheard of to me . but I invited a couple of family members and we headed out to the area which was about a 3 and 1/2 to 4-hour drive. It was March and overcast. when we arrived at the wildlife reserve, we were amazed to see thousands of birds dancing and karooing in an elaborate symphony of sound. It was just mesmerizing. But low and behold, in the middle of the entire group was a single whooping crane, whose code of white feathers stood out dramatically amongst the grayness of its surroundings . I was really taken by the whole experience, the beauty of it all, and the power of nature to an excite and captivate.

My second spark bird experience was equally as amazing. I was on sand Padre Island to visit a friend and had a lot of time on my hands so I would walk up and down the beach endlessly . I was fascinated with the shorebirds, and in particular the sanderlings that just raced back and forth chasing the waves . I was in total delight watching their behavior. they were just so incredibly charming! of course, I enjoyed the other shorebirds as well, as there were many. But this particular bird caught my eye and stood out. They just seem so enchanting! I ended up purchasing a drawing of those same sanderlings from a local artist, and this frame drawing now hangs in my bedroom for viewing every day. It was this second experience that finally launched me into the activity of birding. I haven't turned back since then. [age 50]

Rafaela Spalding

I'm from southeast Brazil, I'm autistic and birds are my "special interest."

When I was a child, all I could talk about was animals, especially birds. None of my family members understood much about birds, but my grandpa liked to support my passion. He gifted me a book about the birds of the Atlantic Forest. It wasn't a field guide; it was actually a hefty book with a single bird species per page, but it quickly became one of my most cherished possessions. I ran around with that book, attempting to identify all the birds around me. Due to the impracticality of the book, I rarely managed to determine the species before the bird flew away.

One day, while observing birds at my grandpa's house in the city of Ubatuba, state of São Paulo, I spotted a stunning blue bird I had never seen before. It was larger and more vibrant than the familiar Blue Dacnis (Dacnis cayana) and had the loveliest white belly. I hurriedly flipped through the pages of my large book... until I found it: a swallow tanager (Tersina viridis). I successfully identified it before it took off, allowing me time to admire that beautiful specimen. After it flew away, I couldn't contain my excitement and spent the day telling everyone I met about what I had seen. That experience changed my life forever, and I became a dedicated birder... well, as dedicated as a 6-year-old with very limited autonomy could be! [age 6]

Caleb

I remember laying on the sofa, lazily scrolling through YouTube, when I stumbled upon a video titled something like "Cockatiel repeating songs" and I was intrigued by the way the parrot sang, the look on its face, the composure, overall by the way it looked and behaved. And one video lead to another, until this interest I had developed into a full blown passion for birds, shaping my dream to become a biologist into becoming an ornithologist working for a bird sanctuary / rehabilitation center for birds of prey.

That video shaped me so much that I became the "bird guy" in my friend group, and everyone around me asks me to identify birds every time they get the occasion to. I love it, I love lovings birds as it helped me come out of a dense cloud of uncertainty of what to do in the future.

I'll forever remember cockatiels being the first bird I was hooked on. [age 11]

Lauren Ledesma

My spark bird was introduced to me by my 1 year old. We moved into a new house with huge windows and surrounded by shrubs and trees. He was entranced by the little birds that hopped around and sang. He would babble at us about the birds and I knew I wanted to encourage any natural naturalist tendencies. So I looked up the name of the little birds. White-crowned sparrows! We then identified the mourning doves and scrub jays that occasionally visited. The floodgates opened! We have an identification guide and a "Common Backyard Birds of Northern California" and multiple bird feeders. Over a year later and we are landscaping our backyard with natives for pollinators and birds and we have a designated "bird watching chair" and bird art all over the windows. My almost 3 year old has mostly moved on to trucks but the rest of the family are confirmed backyard birders! [age 32]

Nicole Alexander

I took an ornithology course in college because I liked the professors, not necessarily birds (I was always a "reptiles" girl). I already owned binoculars that I used for stargazing so I went out on my old one day to look for birds, in the winter of upstate New York. I walked through the snow until I saw a group of birds on a small, leafless tree with red berries at the edge of campus. I looked through my binoculars and was shocked to see bright red and yellow spots on what I assumed was going to be a drab brown bird. "What IS that?" I also saw that the birds had a crest, like a cardinal. I thought only cardinals had a crest. "What IS THAT?" I frantically flipped through the pages of my eastern bird guide, terrified the birds would fly away before I could identify them. [age 22]

Benjamin Costello 

We have a Holly tree just below my bedroom window. One day in mid-February, I was in my room when I heard a very loud and repetitive bird song. The bird kept singing loudly for maybe 10 minutes. I had never really paid attention to birds and bird song before, but this was so noticeable and long, I decided to walk outside to the tree to see if I could find the bird. In the tree was a male Northern Cardinal, and he sat there singing his song on an early spring-like afternoon for another few minutes. I thought it sounded pretty and also as though I could hear his longing for spring and for companionship, and that resonated with me. At the time, I had just started going on walks in my neighborhood to relieve stress and anxiety, and suddenly I found myself noticing all the Northern Cardinals calling and singing since I now knew what they sounded like. And as I got familiar with Northern Cardinals, I wanted to see if I could find some other birds, so I grabbed a field guide and went to the local wetlands, where I quickly found three Red-bellied Woodpeckers calling and chasing each other, presumably trying to establish territory. It was fascinating, and I had to know more and I had to start paying attention to the drama and beauty of the natural world that I had never noticed before. I signed up for Ebird...and then a few days later, everything shut down because of the pandemic, and I had basically infinite time to explore empty trails all day. I'll call both the Northern Cardinal and the Red-bellied Woodpecker my dual spark birds for that reason. [age 23]

Kayla Fisk

My spark bird is the chuck-wills-widow. My family always had bird feeders and were casual birders for as long as I can remember. I of course, joined in, but what started the spiral of obsession was one nice summer night. I like most warm nights, had my window open, listening to the eastern whip/poor-wills and calling (which I didn't learn til much later in life was unusual, that this bird that I took for granted wasn't so common everywhere) and American woodcocks displaying. That night though, I heard a different sound, very similar to the whip-poor-will, but something was off. I remember getting out of bed and waking my parents to tell them there was a weird bird outside. I don't remember how I figured out what bird it was at that time, this was before Merlin and eBird and back when you called a number to leave a recording on a phone number to report any rare birds. Eventually my parents agreed on my possible id and the next day mentioned it to a friend who also was a birder, they of course didn't believe my id at first either, I was just a kid after all. After a day or so to think on it, they realized I knew what a whip-poor-will sounded like, I would know what wasn't one, and decided to swing by that night, after all, it would be nice to hear a whip-poor-will at the very least as they were very uncommon in the region. The surprise was evident on the friends face when, just as I said, a chuck-wills-widow and several whip-poor-wills began calling several yards away from us. Many calls were made, people notified and the next several nights our long driveway was full of cars from people all over the state for this mega-rarity. People from Cornell, birders of all skills and ages. Until then I really wasn't aware of how deep this bird 'obsession' could be, I really hadn't thought about how their were careers around them, how many birds were really out there and the community that was build around people's love for these amazing creatures. This very lost bird had introduced me to the birding community. It was also an awesome bonus to stay up past my bedtime to listen to all these peoples birding stories as they waited for the Chuck-wills-widow to begin calling each night for more than a week. [age 12]

JWP

My spark birds. I have two. 

The first one. 

When I was 10 years old, my parents rented an old house surrounded by a neglected apple orchard, a huge vegetable garden gone to weed, thickets of raspberries and redcurrants and scrubby woods with giant puffballs and fungus scabbed trees that could have been extras in a horror film. It was located halfway up a hill on a narrow one-way street with no neighbors or street lights. No one came to our house on Halloween, it was deemed too scary even by my friends. 

The house had been the first schoolhouse in the area, built in the 1800s. It had been added onto in a slapdash manner - the bedrooms upstairs were reached by a staircase that had been put into an old closet and was steep enough to qualify as a ladder, as we often put our hands on the upper stairs when climbing up and went down backwards. 

It had last been the home of a University professor of biology and his family.The professor had made brown and cream tiles for the fireplace surround showing the evolution of life from amoebas to dinosaurs, to mammals, apes and humans. When he passed away, his wife rented the old creaky house to us and moved to a cozy apartment.

We didn't know much about the birds that filled the woods around us, so my parents bought a little feeder and put it up outside the kitchen window, and a Golden Guide to identify our guests. We saw all the regular feeder visitors and wrote the dates in the little Golden Guide. 

The house had a screen porch on the side surrounded by thick bushes I now know were yews.There was a cherry tree overhanging it and lilies of the valley around the ankles of the porch steps. One summer, a pair of Cardinals decided this was an ideal site to set up house and raise the kids. My parents decreed the porch off limits while the Cardinals raised their brood, so we watched the progress through the bubbled old glass of the living room window. The slow motion count down was excruciatingly long to my young self, from nest building to incubation to finally, the first chirps and squeaks as bug deliveries were shuttled in by the parents. All we could see at first were the tips of beaks above the edge of the nest. As the chicks grew, heads began poking up, yellow rimmed gapes pointed to the incoming mom or dad. 

We watched the whole cycle of nesting to birth, to mousy brown and still flightless youngsters hopping around inside the shrub white their parents tried to herd them back to safety. And then they were gone and we could go out on the porch again. They had become "our" cardinals during the summer and we speculated if visitors to the feeder on the other side of the house were our family. 

My second bird. 

Two years after we lived in the school house, my parents bought an old farmhouse on a former sod farm just outside the city. The derelict barn still stood behind the house, a magnetic attraction for kids. We climbed the beams and played in the piles of hay in our own private kingdom. The road in front of the house was dusty gravel and a few minutes walk out of the back door brought us to corn fields of the next farm. We had no neighbors until the former farm was subdivided and houses began to be built.

I would take the dog and go on long rambles into the countryside, along the lightly traveled roads and across the fields. These walks didn't have a particular purpose, I just liked being outdoors seeing how things had changed since I last walked that way. 

On one ramble in early winter the road was slicked with a skin of ice and the grasses were crunchy underfoot and etched with frost crystals. An ice storm the night before had silvered the landscape. At the top of the hill I saw a puddle with a bubbly white crust of ice begging to be stomped. Twigs from a small shrub had bent into the puddle from the ice weight. I noticed a small blob of feathers stuck to the ice where the twigs bent over. I looked closer and saw a sparrow, ice dusting its feathers. I picked it up, thinking it had frozen, but felt a small pulse of life. I stuck the soggy bundle of fluff inside my parka against my chest. As it warmed, it began to stir, not with fear, but more nestling into the comfort of the heat it was receiving. I talked to it as I walked and felt its spark returning. After a while it shook itself as if to say, OK I'm back, so I lifted it out and let it sit on my palm, almost weightless now that it was dry. It sat very calmly for a few minutes then flew off. I wished it a happy life and continued my walk, but it was a changing experience, to feel that tiny life resurrect over my heart. 

Neither of these sparks immediately turned me into a passionate birder, as I was occupied with teen drama, moving away for college and the not terribly exciting life of a broke 20 something in NYC. I wasn't aware of the birds packed into Central Park because that oasis in its concrete surround didn't fit my stereotype of where you find birds. But the embers still simmered and when we moved to Long Island, which felt like a place where I could find "real" nature, I put up a feeder at our new house and bought a guide book, Roger Tory Peterson's this time, as I was ready for much more information. And the birds came, each with unique qualities observed from the kitchen window. I made notes in the margins of the guide book, and felt the urge for more, to see those birds that were in the book, but not my yard. I joined the local Audubon chapter and went on walks, learning from the more experienced birders who were happy to share their passion. Eventually I became an experienced birder, though there wasn't a moment that I could pinpoint that transition, and there is still so much more to learn and see. Now I pass it along as a trip leader, assuring new converts that everyone starts from square one, makes mistakes, and expands their knowledge. That it's a process that can take a lifetime, but a lifetime of excitement and challenges with every season. [age 10]

Anonymous

I was working as a young field biologist surveying for wildlife in Polk County, FL. There were pastures with open fields. I started noticing small hawk like birds hovering above fields. It wasn't one of my target species but for some reason I had to know what it was. After that I starting finding myself noticing more and more birds that I had to know. The rest is history! [age 25]

George Crafts

My "spark bird" was a book: Audubon's "Birds of America ". Looking through the many beautiful drawings it contains, I was utterly fascinated, and that attraction to birds has never left me. I first saw the book in my grandfather's home when I was a child. "Dee Dee" as we called him was one of my heroes in those days. He and grandmother lived 800 miles away from us, so we only saw them once a year. While we were visiting I would spend hours going through his large collection of picture books about animals from all over the world, but "Birds of America" was my favorite. I remember especially being impressed by the wild turkey, the first picture in the book, and the magnificent dark eagle, the one he thought was a new species. The drawings of birds now extinct also had a powerful impact on me. Many years passed before I actually began to explore birding, but I know that book is behind it all - and now I have my own copy! [age 6]

Jennifer Fendya

It was early in the pandemic - 2020 - and I was walking in Forest Lawn cemetery in Buffalo, NY. I can't recall the exact time of year, but I know there were leaves on the trees and it was a beautiful sparkly day. I grew up with a backyard bird feeder my parents tended daily and I knew the birds common to our area, like robins, bluejays, cardinals, crows, seagulls, sparrows, and can identify those with iconic visuals like hawks, herons, goldfinches and woodpeckers. But on that day in Forest Lawn, when I saw a blue flash whizz by me along the Scajaquada creek bed making a "chittering" call, I called back, "Kingfisher!!!" I wasn't sure where my response came from, as I'd never owned a birding guidebook or remember encountering this particular avian performance before. I thought about the Fisher King of Arthurian legend, protector and embodiment of the land, and also about being thrilled as a child by the daring aerial acrobatics of the Blue Angels. After sitting for a while to watch the noisy back-and-forth fly-by, enraptured and entertained, I had enough descriptors to Google my new friend. I was bursting with excitement when "Belted Kingfisher" turned up, so, proud of this personal "first," I texted friends and family my good news and received back their kind congrats. I felt extremely joyful, even without knowing that I'd just met my Spark Bird! [age 57]

Ryan

Saw a family of crows attacking a Merlin hawk while the hawk tried to hunt.  [age 15]

Ellen Tomczak

We built a house in a rural area, moving from the city. I received a bird feeder and bird seed as a house warming gift. I put it up in my yard. One day I spotted a beautiful bird I had never seen before. I had to buy a book, since it was the spring of 1995 and I couldn't google it. Next came binoculars. I began to see more and more birds. I was hooked! I joined a bird group through our local science museum. I have been birding ever since that spring day. I have traveled around the United States with this group, searching for new birds to see. My life list is just under 500 birds. My spark bird is the Rose breasted grosbeak.  [age 43]

Kathy Contrino

My spark bird is the Bald eagle. When I was a child eagles were endangered due to pesticides. I knew they existed but had never observed one in the wild. My first observation was at Iroquois NWR. I cry sometimes when I see them in the wild. I know their continued existence is a testament to what we can do if we set our mind to it. Resilience is a choice and we can all make that choice in the face of climate change.   [age 8]

Judy Liddell 

Four years before I retired, I 'stumbled' into birding. While I had been fascinated with birds - even using them in my home décor, I never thought I had the patience to really slow down and pay attention to them.

That all changed when I had my knees replaced in early 2002. My friend Barbara, a long-time birder, hung some seed bells in the bushes outside my bedroom window - and I started paying attention to my visitors. I found a field guide that had belonged to my Dad and tried to identify my new friends, calling Barb frequently to tell her about what I was seeing. Heartened by my enthusiasm, Barbara hung a suet cake in the bush, and soon a Curve-billed Thrasher paid a visit.

I was enthralled. Here was a bird that was not little and seemingly drab - but larger, with a yellow eye and long curved bill. I was hooked.

As I recovered and learned to walk again with two new knees, I went to the Rio Grande Nature Center on the weekend, walked slowly, and then sat on a bench and tried to identify birds. I devoured Kingbird Highway and took my field guide to bed every night to study. This was the beginning of what would become my 'second career' when I retired 4 years later. [age 59]

Mimi Darragh 

In May of 1974 after graduating from college, a group of us traveled to Canada. We were able to find a fisherman to take us out around Bonaventure Island off the coast of Quebec. Since it was nesting season, we could not land on the island but there were thousands of seabirds flying all around us: gannets and murres mostly and of course we were looking for puffins that were pretty rare at that time. It was the experience of all the birds flying, soaring, diving all around us that hooked me to find out more about birds. [age 21]

Haley Pond

I first got into birding during my senior year of high school when I took a Zoology class through Jamestown Community College. The entire spring semester of the class was spent studying birds! Our teacher, Mr. Jankowski, gave us weekly ID, sound, and scientific name quizzes. I always hated taking quizzes, until they were about identifying birds. It became almost like a game to me, and I completely fell in love with trying to identify birds and their calls. Mr. Jankowski was also my golf coach, so we spent a lot of time birding while on the golf course and on the drive to matches. I realized I was hooked on birds when I spent more time birding during a golf match than actually playing golf! Golf courses and my high school biology class are really where I found my passion for birding.  [age 18]