Birdwatching for fun and no profit

If somebody had told me thirty years ago that I'd be going to birdwatching events one day, without needing to be bound and gagged, I'd have laughed. Or punched him. And yet, that's exactly what I did today.

I spent the day walking around a cold, damp wood with a bunch of bird enthusiasts, all of us wearing three coats and two hats each, carrying binoculars, some of us with cameras attached to lenses as long as our arms. I accepted the invitation to this event with some trepidation -- what if I actually liked it? The very idea...

Everybody but me knew all the different bird calls. They knew the migration patterns, mating behaviours, and preferred habitats of dozens of bird species. They knew what each species ate and how often, where the birds nested, and countless similar minutiae. I was alternately amazed and appalled. Amazed that anybody could marshal so much knowledge; appalled that anybody actually did.

Don't get me wrong: I like birds. I have bird boxes and bird feeders all over my garden, and dotted around my woods. I love to see birds flitting around, going about their birdie lives. I'll happily sit and watch them for hours (ideally from indoors, at this time of year).

But I don't know anything about birds and -- to get to the point -- I don't feel I need to. Seeing birds brightens my day, and I'm quite content for that to be the sum of my ornithological knowledge.

I've always been mystified how certain people take pleasure in developing an encyclopedic knowledge of subjects that can't possibly have any practical use. Whether it's birds, or locomotives, or sports results, some of us seem to want -- perhaps to need -- to feel that we have completely mastered some body of knowledge.

This obsessive attention to detail is a classic symptom of Aspberger's syndrome, of course. But giving it a name doesn't explain it. How did we humans evolve this odd behaviour? Did it once confer some survival advantage? If it did, why do only some of us exhibit this trait?

I don't need to know the subtle differences between the goldcrest and the firecrest, or exactly when swallows will return to different parts of the UK. That so many people do know these things, and countless other avian facts with no practical application, I find magnificently, heroically barmy. But I wouldn't want it any other way: there are too many neurotypical people in the world.

I have to accept, thought, that birdwatchers probably think it's equally barmy that I know the instruction set of Zilog Z80 CPU in hexadecimal. But that's different. Um...

Published 2026-03-18, updated 2026-03-18

Birdwatching for fun and no profit

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