A Short List of Moments in My Life in Which Birds Were Significant Before I Began Birding

Published on February 21, 2026

When I was young our school would take field trips to a local old growth forest preserve, Wesselman Woods. They presented us with two taxidermy owls: a Great Horned Owl named Hattie and an Eastern Screech Owl named Artemis. They told us these were their "Animal Ambassadors." In addition to these, the lobby of their nature center was filled with many other taxidermy versions of the animals you could see in the woods outside. You can now buy Artemis and Hattie pillows in their website's gift shop. If anyone is ever looking for a present for me, this would be an excellent one.
My father pointing out a cardinal to me in our backyard, at some time in my childhood.
My father explaining that doves made a sound that sounded like they were saying "Bob White." (Or possibly that there was a bird named a Bobwhite, which is actually the case, whereas the dove thing is less true, but for some reason the memory I have is of it being about doves, but whether he was confused then or I was then or I am now, I can't say.)
When I was in college, I had a sort of twee folk music project called Tinyfolk. Inspired by artists like The Moldy Peaches, Jonathan Richman, and Beat Happening, I deliberately wrote songs that were sort of ramshackle and cute or childlike, trying to flee masculinity for all I was worth within the boundaries of what was acceptable-ish to a young man in southern Indiana. I spent a night on Wikipedia marveling about how beautiful owls are and, not knowing what to do about it, wrote a song where I named many owls. The chorus went like this:

The owls hold our future dear,
our future is in owls.
You, me and the Southern Boobook dear,
our future is in owls.
The Tawny and the Snowy, dear
Pygmy and Great-horned,
our future is in owls, dear and
you best be forewarned.
The outcome of the above song, which became one of my most requested, and made me think about owls much more often (along with watching Twin Peaks for the first time) was mostly that I would buy lots of owl-themed decor for my apartment. It was very popular at the time (the late 00s). At my first wedding, rather than a bride and groom on the cake, we had them make two Barn Owls for us.
Once on our college campus my girlfriend at the time (later my wife, later my ex-wife) found an injured Downy Woodpecker. We put it in a shoe box with a lot of soft tissue and found a local Wildlife Rehabilitator, who came and met us and picked it up. While we waited (it took a few hours) we named it "Pandabear" because she was black and white. This is the first time I remember seeing a bird and having the urge to look up what kind of bird it was.

_{A mating pair of Downy Woodpeckers on our feeder this week}
On a whim I bought a "Guide to the Birds of Indiana" at our college bookstore. It sat in our bathroom for ages and I rarely flipped through it.
As we drove back and forth from Indiana to Chicago, my ex would count all the hawks she saw on the drive.
I once saw a Barred Owl perched on a shed behind a queer punk house I was living in in Portland, OR, around 2014. This is the first time I remember seeing an owl in real life (that wasn't taxidermized) and the second time I can remember having the urge to look up what kind of bird a bird was.
Watching the bird feeder at my mother-in-law's house in Portland in 2016, where my second wife (and current close friend) and I lived in the basement. She (my wife's mom) and her boyfriend were birders, and taught me about their Portland feeder birds: Scrub Jays, Steller's Jays, Northern Flickers, Dark-Eyed Juncos, Spotted Towhees, American Crows. I remember thinking, "This is lovely. I would like to live somewhere where I can put out a birdfeeder and learn to identify all the birds that come to it."