How Birding by Ear Helps Me Embrace Change

Lessons From Nature’s Ever-Changing Song

When I walk into the park with my ears perked, hungry for birdsong, I feel like a monk. I’m ready to use the skills that I’ve honed over hours of training. From an outsider’s perspective, I look like a girl walking, and I am a girl walking. Walking and also listening.

With practice, time, and a little bit of luck, I have learned to map the birds in my surroundings by sound alone. No longer do I walk outside with music blaring in my headphones or my mind lost in thought. Without any conscious prompting on my part, my ears are tuned into my surroundings, noticing every small chirp.

Meditative Listening

Birding—and birding by ear, especially—allows me to enter a flow state, a mindful state, where I am in my body completely and my body is in my environment. In the wild, my sensitivity is not a burden but a gift. “To pay attention,” Mary Oliver wrote, “this is our endless/and proper work.”

There is a form of meditation called listening meditation where you sit with your eyes closed and allow your attention to alight on the sounds around you. Birding by ear is my listening meditation. In the decade that I’ve been living with chronic pain, I have spent countless hours trying to escape my body or distract from what I am feeling.

Things have changed since I committed to meditation. Nature and mindfulness are qualified assistants as I do the work of loving myself, loving my body, and loving my brain, even when it hurts. Birding allows me to examine the nature of change and practice acceptance.

The Art of Birding by Ear

Each species has multiple different calls, which makes birding by ear especially challenging. The melody of a song sparrow sounds nothing like the barking call they emit when they fight. Black phoebes—a striking, tuxedo-clad flycatcher common in the suburbs—have at least three different songs. The whine of a juvenile goldfinch begging for food is distinct from adult warning calls and breeding calls. In nature, everything has a purpose and a place.

I did not set out with a goal to learn to bird by ear. My boyfriend Peter and I began birding in earnest in 2020, and it didn’t take long to become intimately acquainted with the local park and the birds that visit. (The photos in this post were all taken by him. See his IG account for more.)

Learning to use binoculars was tough, and for the first several months I was unable to do so without it making me dizzy. I live with constant migraine symptoms, which means I am incredibly sensitive to the sights, sounds, and movements around me, both to my detriment and delight.

Sensitivity in the Suburbs

My hypersensitivity is a liability in the high-density suburb with more strip malls than parks that I call home. The rumble of cars going by, the whine of a gas-powered leaf blower, music blaring in a restaurant—the challenge of navigating my auditory landscape on a day-to-day basis keeps my orbit small. I work from home and rarely drive. Unlike the birds who travel thousands of miles each year, my home is stationary and extends only as far as my neighborhood park.

But stepping outside, even just in my backyard, connects me immediately to the natural world that exists within and outside of my body. Even indoors, birdsong drifting through the window is my background noise.

Listening to the birds live their lives around me is nourishing. It gives my brain a break from hyperfocus and allows me to melt into my surroundings, saying a prayer of gratitude for every sparrow, wren, and finch that enters the orbit of my attention.

Seasonal Shifts

Despite their small size, most songbirds travel hundreds of miles each year. They pass through southern California on their way north to breed in the spring and on their way south to spend the winter in a warmer climate. Their plumage changes, as do their songs. A week ago, I hadn’t seen a white-crowned sparrow for months, and this week there is an almost constant stream of their melodious song through my open window.

Birds remind me that nature is constantly in motion. They remind me to notice seasons and subtle changes in light.

There are seasons for courtship and raising young, and there are seasons for travel. There are seasons for asserting independence and seasons for embracing the safety of the flock. There are seasons to embrace visual beauty, and there are seasons to rest and molt. There are seasons for migrating warblers and seasons for sparrows. A lesson at the heart of both mindfulness and nature is that change is constant.

Embracing Change

Through necessity, I no longer view my body as something broken that needs to be fixed. I am always in some degree of pain, and I never feel clear-headed. And yet, I feel peace.

Embracing nature and meditation means embracing change. I still have more daily symptoms than I’d like, but I no longer feel terrified for the future. I no longer have to worry, “What will happen if my pain never goes away?”

I am making strides toward accepting that I can live a beautiful and valuable life even with chronic pain, and nature and birds are an integral part of my healing. (I have a love-hate relationship with the word “healing,” but that’s a conversation for another day.)

Even on days when I can’t leave my bed, I can practice the art of listening. A bird feeder full of seeds and an open window are all I need to be reminded that there is a living, changing world outside of my window, just as there is a living, changing world inside of myself.

Embracing change is scary, but it is also empowering. If nature is constantly changing and I am nature, then I am constantly changing. And if I am constantly changing, then I can get better. My pain is not an immovable force but an undulating mass, like the inside of a lava lamp.

Even if it never goes away completely, my pain can shift. It can get better. And I desperately need to believe that it can get better.

Birding by ear, though unplanned, has become an essential part of my life, a gateway to mindfulness, and a reminder that change is a constant force in both the natural world and within ourselves. Despite the challenges of chronic migraine, I’ve come to cherish my body and appreciate the gifts it offers.

Just as the seasons and songs of birds shift and transform, I’ve learned to embrace change, finding hope that even if my pain never fully disappears, it can get better. In this journey of discovery, I’ve borrowed courage from the birds, and I now face the present moment and the future with a profound sense of peace.