I have always been unusually interested in birds. It’s hard for me to have a conversation longer than a couple of minutes without the subject turning to birds, because both my work and how I spend my spare time tend to involve them in some capacity. My parents helped to encourage this passion, bringing me on hikes and naturalist club meetings from a young age. As a result, I was well connected with other bird-lovers through my childhood and teens, and my avian interest seemed normal. It wasn’t until well into my undergraduate years that I noticed that the way I spent my time and energy was quite unusual. I started thinking about what had attracted me to birds in particular and found it surprisingly challenging to pin down. Yes, there’s the flight, the color, the feathers, but those don’t seem to get to the point.

The eminently precocious six-year-old Calvin from Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes articulates these inexpressible feelings best. In one comic strip, Hobbes asks Calvin why he’s looking for frogs. Calvin responds, “I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.” Perhaps it’s just that: inscrutable, ineffable. However, a major roadblock was lifted when I realized that I had an aversion to the word “beauty.”

Many Westerners are afflicted with what has been described as an “allergy to sincerity.” We avoid discussing topics of depth or lace them with irony to avoid discomfort. And there isn’t much that is more sincere than saying earnestly that you find birds beautiful. Publicly expressing aesthetic taste is embarrassing; it makes you vulnerable to the mockery of anyone with different tastes – or with no taste whatsoever. Perhaps this cringing from sincerity has always been present, but it is exacerbated by the internet, where people have mocked everything under the sun. Before the internet, it might have been easy to think that nobody could possibly have something against wholesome beauty. Now, we have seen too much.

Calvin has no such qualms. When he and Hobbes find a dead bird on the ground, Calvin observes: “Isn’t it beautiful? It’s so delicate.” Calvin turns to contemplating the miracle of life, the ruthlessness of nature, and the precious fragility of existence; to carry on with daily affairs, he tells Hobbes, these things can’t really be thought about too much – which must be why everyone acts so thoughtlessly. “It’s very confusing,” he concludes, “I suppose it will all make sense when we grow up.” The pair sit down in silence under a tree to watch birds fly past.

Perhaps it is in something’s absence that we most deeply realize its beauty. I think of a bird deprived of life, limp on the ground. Although I can still appreciate the intricacy of its feathers, it will never again fly or sing from the treetops. Or I think of the many places I have seen birds, and what those places would be like without them: swallows flying laps around a farm pond in the summer, hunting for flies and dropping down to take sips of water from the surface – those same swallows, perched on branches along the Amazon River in the winter; a kite soaring low overhead, eating a grasshopper it caught in a nearby soybean field; little storm petrels dancing on the waves far from land, half a world away from where they were born; loons yodeling from a forest lake under the night sky; a robin standing on the side of the garden while we work, waiting patiently for us to dig up worms. Birds connect us to the rest of the world and fill it with a vitality that nothing else could replace. If they were absent, the world would feel so much flatter.

In Matthew 6, while discussing the various anxieties of life, Jesus tells his disciples to consider the birds of the air. In essence, he says, “Look at birds – and don’t worry.” Perhaps we can aspire to improve at both of these. As the late theologian John Stott noted in his book The Birds Our Teachers, the nuance of Jesus’ “look” in the original Greek “meant more than that we should notice them. For the Greek verb employed here means to fix the eyes on or take a good look at.” Stott’s life followed this precept; he was an avid birdwatcher and observed around 2,500 species in his life – nearly a quarter of all the bird species on the planet.

Surveys from the United States and the United Kingdom suggest that around a third of adults in both countries have taken steps to actively seek or attract birds. The positive mental health benefits of birdwatching have been supported by recent surveys as well. Observing birds is a motivation to go outside, which in turn promotes exercise and reduces stress levels. The colors and sounds of birds invite undivided attention, and learning the names of common species builds a connection with the space around us.

If you spend a lot of time observing birds in the same place in this way, you begin to learn their patterns throughout the year. Where I live on the west end of Lake Ontario, we start the year with duck season. Many thousands of ducks spend their winters on the Great Lakes, feeding on mussels and crustaceans, while they wait for the lakes and bogs of the boreal forest and Arctic tundra to thaw. While I love the winter ducks, the season I most eagerly anticipate is spring migration. It starts with a trickle: the robins staking out the lawns, the killdeer in the fields, and red-winged blackbirds around the ponds. By early May, the game is truly afoot. The real spectacle, of course, is the warblers. The wood warblers of eastern North America are the envy of the world; the cacophony of colors and diversity of species are awe-inspiring. These little birds prefer to stay out of reach in the tree canopies or skulk in the bushes, making them hidden gems easily overlooked by most.

In the summer, bird life slows down as they settle into their routines and establish nests. But the birds from further north pass through again in the fall, their numbers bolstered by the new young of the year. You can hear them as they surge past if you step outside at night in September or October: the faint peeps of the thrushes and the chip notes of sparrows and warblers, hundreds of feet overhead. By day, hawks and falcons soar overhead in the same direction. They will travel on to Central America, some even to South America, to places I have never been and never will. But the ducks are also returning, and they will stay with us until the spring.

If you have dedicated the time to become familiar with the seasonal cycles, you will also notice patterns that aren’t as cyclical. Even in the short time that I have been alive, I’ve seen changes. I have seen the edges of wetlands and woodlots bitten into by developments of expensive copy-and-paste suburbs. I have memories of warblers singing in trees that are now replaced by walls, road, and lawn. There are species that used to breed near my city that have declined and disappeared – effects of urban growth and shifting agricultural practices. And these are just the events within my memory. There are photos and paintings of the shores of Lake Ontario near my hometown; where there were once marshes full of ducks there is now steel and concrete. Passenger pigeons – like mourning doves but larger and more colorful – once flew through our streets in great numbers. One man wrote, “I have seen King Street full of them, and the sky was often darked by the swiftly flying legions of pigeons. From half-way up the Mountain steps at James Street, we used to stand and shoot them as they passed. Often, on succeeding days, they flew too high for our guns to reach them. Then they would fly so low that they could be knocked down with sticks.” These birds were once so numerous that rail cars were filled with them to sell for meat. There were so many that it was impossible to quell their numbers. And then there weren’t. The passenger pigeons are gone now, one of several wonderful species now absent from the continent – and the world.

It feels strange to grieve a reality that I was never there for, but this is not a unique experience. It may even be universal. In The Lord of the Rings, as the elf Legolas looks down from the heights of Minas Tirith awaiting its siege, he notices gulls flying up the Anduin River below: “‘Look!’ he cried, ‘Gulls! They are flying far inland. A wonder they are to me and a trouble to my heart.’” Any birdwatcher who has attempted to identify gulls may hold similar feelings (although perhaps for somewhat different reasons). Legolas will be haunted by them for the rest of his life on Middle-earth. But it wasn’t only the gulls that he was haunted by. Their calls awaken a longing to return to the Blessed Realm across the sea, birthplace of the elves. This is what Tolkien’s elves called “sea-longing,” or what we might call Sehnsucht or “nostalgia for paradise.” Once we have witnessed the beauty of creation, and experienced its limitations and loss, we are sometimes left with the feeling that something is missing; there must be more. We yearn for a wholeness that temporal beauty evokes but cannot fulfil.

This yearning might be powerful enough to motivate us to establish some of that wholeness here and now. Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is famous for his belief that beauty will save the world. It seems worth mentioning that at one point, the prince says, “The earth holds nothing finer than a bird.” George Orwell proposes the same idea in his essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” where he argues that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies, and birds, “one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred.” Directing our attention toward things that are beautiful clarifies the contrast between them and things that are not, making the latter less appealing. That is at least a start in the right direction.

I don’t know how to save the world. But I do know how to look at birds, and you are welcome to join me.