Birding with Benefits: How Nature Improves Your Well Being with Ryan Dibala

Sometimes all you need is to spend time in the great outdoors, where you soak up the sunshine, breathe fresh air, and commune with wildlife. Getting out for a walk in your local park or even birding alone or with your family can have a powerful impact on your brain. Birding by itself teaches us patience and gently coaxes us to be calm. It’s a great opportunity to just zone out or have a little reflection and think calmly. Our guest for today will definitely agree on that matter. According to Ryan Dibala of Birding Man Adventures, birding is a great way for people to get outdoors and connect with nature. --- Listen to the podcast here: Birding with Benefits: How Nature Improves Your Well Being with Ryan Dibala Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I’d like to switch gears with you a little bit and I’d like to talk to you about birding. Now, this is a topic that we have yet to discuss on this particular podcast because it’s a type of experience that people either know a lot about or know very little about. Some people get really, really into birding and some people just don’t know much about it. But, in life, there’s going to be a lot of experiences like that and it’s good to be exposed to the large depth of experiences that there are out there. According to my guest today, Ryan Dibala of Birding Man Adventures, birding is a great way for people to get outdoors and connect into nature. --- Ryan, welcome to the program. Pleasure to be here, Steve. Thanks for having me. Oh, thank you so much. And, Ryan, tell me about your experience with birding. What made birding be the thing that you wanted to, first of all, do a lot of yourself and also bring to others? Right after college, I was working as a biologist on Santa Catalina Island and we were actually restoring bald eagles to the national park after a massive decline in numbers due to DDT, which I’m sure many people are familiar with DDT and what it did as it worked its way up the food chain, essentially with the raptors, like bald eagles, it depleted their egg shells of calcium so the nesting eagles would crush the eggs and then that would prevent successful recruitment ultimately. So we were actually involved in the direct manipulations of eggs and chicks on the island’s eagles’ nests so, of course, I was around other birders, I had my first pair of binoculars and a spotting scope and I was able to tune into some of the smaller birds on the island. That particular island has several different endemics that only are there, like many islands have, they have species that only can be found on those islands so I think I saw, it was a Hutton's Vireo, a Catalina Hutton's Vireo, and that might have been my gateway bird, I guess you could call it. A gateway bird, never heard it described that way before. So ever since that moment, I’ve really been paying attention to the birds around me. I found that it really slows me down, it helps me focus. We have these weapons of mass distraction in our pockets and we’re always on them, these cell phones that distract us from the world and prevent us from tuning into what’s in front of our eyes at the present moment. And so, as a result, we’ve seen a lot more ADD and NDD, nature deficit disorder, and realizing that going out into nature and slowing down and looking at the world as it is right around me, that’s helped center me and relieve a lot of anxiety that has come about from the world that we live in with so much technology so that’s one of many reasons that I continue to bird today. I can certainly go into more of the reasons why I think it’s an amazing pursuit and something that more people should do. What does birding entail? Like if, let’s say, these podcasts usually come out on Tuesdays and if you’re listening in the middle of the week and someone says, “Alright, this sounds really interesting. I wanna go birding on Saturday,” what is that day going to look like? So it can look like a million different things. It can be you sitting with a coffee in your backyard and looking at your bird feeder and birding for 10 minutes. That’s an act of birding where you’re looking at what comes to your feeder and you can just take it in leisurely and make notes. Maybe you already know what you’re seeing because you’ve seen it for the last however many years you’ve been looking at your feeder or maybe you don’t so maybe it has you picking up a field guide, flipping through the pages, playing this little match game trying to figure out what exactly did I just see. So it can be 10 minutes in your backyard looking at your feeder or it can be 24-hour birdathon. Actually, this week, my wife, Angie, and I and a couple of friends of ours are going to head out for a “24-hour” period and I’m going to put those 24 hours in quotation marks because it’s probably not going to be quite 24 hours. Yeah, it’s a long time to stay up in one without sleeping but some people do it. I know, yeah. So it’s essentially this idea of going out and trying to find as many birds as you can in 24 hours. You go out during the day, you go out during the morning, you take breaks, you probably go out at night, maybe do some owling and, throughout the day, you’re just trying to make that list as big as you can so you’re going to visit a variety of different habitats, you’re going to maximize the environments that you’re in so you can see more birds and you generally try to line that day up with optimal weather patterns so you want to get a day where the birds are migrating or you can also get a day where if you’re looking at the weather patterns, if you’re lucky, you can line up with what we call a fallout where you have all these birds that are exhausted after migrating for however long, generally over large geographic areas, they could be oceans, for example, the Gulf of Mexico is a great example where they come on to the coast of Mississippi or Louisiana and they just fall out because they’re so exhausted and then they spend time in this area. So, you think about the weather patterns, what they’re doing, where you’re going, maybe you’re going to a place where fallouts are more regular, and then you can maximize the number of birds that you see that way. So, depending on how intense you want to get about it, it can be this really intricate thing where you’re looking at the weather patterns, you’re looking at what’s been seen previously or within the previous 24 hours so that you know what you should be looking for at a particular place at a particular time. So, a couple questions. First on a goofier note, so a few weeks ago, I was walking my dog in City Park, which is a park a little bit east of downtown Denver and there was a bunch of birds sitting in that big pond there and my dog looked at them and then started running after them. Does this mean that my dog qualifies as a birder? I’d say so. I’d say so. Your dog is generally interested in the birds, but probably going to want to eat those birds when it gets to them. Yeah, that seems a little bit off the actual purpose. My other question is that, given that birding is about slowing down and spending some time in nature, if you do one of these birdathons where you’re trying to see as many species of bird in one day, does that have the potential to detract from the original mission to slow down? Absolutely. I think that if you have the end all goal in mind of seeing as many species as you possibly can, you start to get away from what really makes birding special, and some of you may have seen the movie The Big Year with Steve Martin, Jack Black, I think Owen Wilson was in that movie as well, but it tells the story of these individuals that are doing a big year. They’re trying to find as many species of birds in one year as they possibly can. This is one of the pursuits of avid birders. And it gets cutthroat just like anything else, any other hobby can get cutthroat where people are doing whatever it is they can to get the job done and pushing anybody away or just forgetting about what it means to be a good person. It’s a really funny movie, but, in my personal opinion, it definitely gets away from this idea of slowing down and being in nature and actually birding and what I found most special is when you just go out and you stand there and you let the birds come to you, you slow down, you can even meditate, work some meditation into it, focus on your breathing, and just look at what’s coming in in the world around you. My wife, Angie, and I, if we’re going to go out for a hike, Angie always has to specify, “Ry, are we gonna go birding or we’re gonna go hiking?” because there’s a difference. So if we’re hiking, that means we have a destination. We want to get to that destination and get back. If we’re going birding, there is no destination. It’s always an adventure, it’s always a surprise. We could find ourselves in a place that we never imagined going to. Just the other day I was at a place called Lowell Ponds, it’s fairly close to where I am, it’s in sort of the Northern Denver Metro area, and I would have never gone to this spot if it wasn’t for birding, but I was there and I was exploring new terrain and I saw a lot of great birds. Our approach is we’re going to visit four different places. In each of those spots, we’ll probably stay for two hours. So you can call us weaklings, if you want, because we’re definitely not going to be anywhere close to 24 hours but what we’re going to do is since it’s going to be quality time, not necessarily the quantity of time and we’re going to go out there and we’re just going to basically be patient. We’re going to stand, we’re going to look, we’re going to watch and see what comes to us. And it’s just fun. We actually do this as a fundraiser for Denver Audubon,...