In "Trying to Find Your Place in the World? Try Birding From a Different Angle." [1] Ty Burr discusses how he turned to bird watching and how a new perspective can catalyze enlightenment:

BirdCast lets us look down from above, and that changes everything. A joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Colorado State University and U. Mass Amherst, it’s a website that lets us see them from a vantage point hundreds of miles above Earth, capturing each night’s continental migration as collected by over 140 radar stations across the country — data gathered about birds on the wing. The site went live to the public in 2018, around the time my own birding was deepening from a lifelong side project into something more personally, even spiritually, necessary — a way of being in the world that I had trouble finding elsewhere. After 40 mostly satisfying years as a film critic, I began to feel all those imagined visions closing around my head. I yearned to shake them off, to return to reality; birding has come to seem one of the more graceful ways to do that. (So has Zen meditation, and the overlap between the two can at times be nearly complete: Each activity teaches you to be acutely present while encouraging the self to dissolve.)

... other senses like hearing can likewise add depth and breadth and height to understanding:

I discovered BirdCast through a friend and fellow birder I call Hardcore Jim, because he’s the kind of guy who takes online courses in sparrows. Over the past few springs, Jim has been helping me learn to bird by ear — to separate the robinlike chirrups of a rose-breasted grosbeak or a scarlet tanager from, um, a robin — which, once you get tourist-proficient in the language, is like a giant aural map unfolding in front of you. BirdCast is like that, but much bigger. ...

Burr concludes:

To me, the nightly BirdCast map has come to mean a great deal, not least a corrective to our human-centric view of the planet. BirdCast reorients us in both space and time. It shifts our understanding of ecosystems from the narrow — the street, the neighborhood, the town — to a vast globe that birds traverse twice a year because they must. Looking at that ceaseless neon flow forces a viewer to acknowledge patterns that long predate our appearance on the stage and, unless we succeed in our drive to kill everything on the planet, could long outlast us. Within this epoch the thing that matters — a bird setting out on a journey a thousand miles long, not data but feather and bone — is still here. But BirdCast helps us see that one creature and ourselves as fractals of a larger picture in which we are infinitely smaller yet bound by conscience and consciousness to obligation.

(cf BirdlessSilence (2004-06-05), BirdySunset (2006-12-03), Slow Birding (2022-12-22), ...) - ^z - 2023-04-19