Birding to Change the World

Birding to Change the World 

By Trish O’Kane 

HarperCollins Publishers, 2024 

Hardcover: $29.99 

Genre: Nonfiction, Environmental 

Reviewed by William Deutsch 

Every Spring, I teach a Birding Basics course through the Lifelong Learning Institute at Auburn University. I love watching septuagenarians become children in an Alabama park, with eyes wide open and mouths agape upon seeing a bird in full breeding plumage recently returned from the tropics. But that amazement is often followed by a quizzical look and pensive mood: Why is this the first time I’ve noticed this little gem? They’ve been all around me for decades. Why wasn’t I more aware?  

That revelation and accompanying questions are what started author Trish O’Kane on her journey of birding, teaching, and environmental activism, condensed into her new memoir, Birding to Change the World. The book begins at the University of Vermont, where she teaches a Birding to Change the World course. To her students’ amazement, she admits that she’s an “accidental birder and accidental teacher” who came to both in middle age because of a visit to one of the worst prisons in the US. That prison was the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama, where she taught creative writing to inmates while employed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Her teaching career progressed to the Auburn University Department of Journalism and on to Tulane University, where she had a life-changing epiphany. 

Just before starting her first term of teaching at Tulane, Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, broke levees, and inundated her low-lying house containing beloved objects, including books and artwork. She recalled that the local birds were unusually loud in the preceding days, warning of an impending disaster that she and many humans largely ignored. While she sat in the destruction that followed, pondering human lives lost, her mud-soaked possessions, and the toxic soup of standing water all around her that was exacerbated by her society’s consumptive lifestyle, she pledged to “learn how to live on this earth without destroying it.” 

Birds increasingly entered her life as inspiring teachers about both her interior and exterior worlds, which she had previously been oblivious to. She notes that birds are symbols of liberation and concedes, “They certainly liberated me.” Yes, they liberated her from “a journalism career that had gone stale,” the “mental cage of a toxic relationship” with her father, and “the worst depression of my life…when I sunk into a hole of hopelessness.” 

The book moves through engaging stories of birds and their complex, beautiful, and sometimes quirky behaviors, which increasingly guided her life. When her path led to Madison, Wisconsin, for doctoral studies in natural resources, a fortuitous course assignment to regularly go birding in Warner Park revealed she had a “wall in [her] brain separating nature from anything human.” Birds to the rescue; observing a phoebe taught her to bust down that wall and see interconnections at every turn. 

When Warner Park was threatened by development, O’Kane used her avian lessons to fight like hell for its preservation. She found that the bird behavior of mobbing – showing up in large numbers to fend off a threatening predator – works well against a prowling cat in the yard, and against overly-ambitious developers at a City Council meeting.  

Birding to Change the World will draw you into the beauty and wonder of bird life, but be prepared to go deeper. O’Kane’s reflections and compelling life stories will move you beyond what she calls “green feel-goodism” to speak up, show up, and tirelessly toil to save the natural world and, thus, ourselves. 

Dr. Bill Deutsch is a Research Fellow, Emeritus at the Auburn University School of Fisheries, Aquaculture and Aquatic Sciences. He is the author of Alabama Rivers: A Celebration & Challenge and Ancient Life in Alabama: The Fossils, the Finders & Why It Matters (www.alabamarocksandrivers.com).