An article by Holly Stark, North Lincolnshire writer and MA Creative Writing graduate, University of Hull.
The first time I used the Merlin Bird ID app, I was standing half-awake in a garden listening to a bird I could not name.
For a few seconds the app listened too.
Then, almost magically, names began appearing on the screen. Robin. Blackbird. Wren.
It felt less like using technology and more like being allowed into a conversation that had been happening my entire life without me.
Birdwatching once carried a particular stereotype in Britain. Older men in camouflage jackets standing silently with binoculars and flasks of tea. But increasingly, birding belongs to younger people too. On TikTok and Instagram, people in their twenties document dawn walks, rare sightings, bird lists and muddy boots with the same enthusiasm previous generations reserved for nightlife or fashion hauls. Friends send each other recordings of birdsong. University students gather for bird walks. People who once could not identify trees suddenly know the call of a chiffchaff.
Research published by the RSPB recently found a staggering 1,088% increase in birdwatching among 16 to 29-year-olds in Britain since 2018, with almost 750,000 young people now regularly birdwatching. Across all age groups, participation has reportedly risen by 47% over the past eight years.
The scale of global engagement is astonishing too. During this year’s Global Big Day, more than two million birders documented 8,055 bird species in a single day, roughly 73% of all bird species on Earth. A quiet hobby once stereotyped as niche now connects millions of people through shared attention to the living world.
My own most exciting sightings have all happened close to home. A tawny owl appearing at dusk in Saxby All Saints. A flash of electric blue from a kingfisher at Far Ings Nature Reserve in Barton upon Humber. Puffins wheeling around the cliffs at RSPB Bempton Cliffs. Nature and wildlife feel remarkably accessible along the Humber and throughout Yorkshire.
Perhaps this shift makes sense.
We are living through ecological grief, digital exhaustion and a profound crisis of attention. Everything competes for our focus constantly. Notifications, advertising, productivity culture, algorithmic feeds designed to fracture concentration into smaller and smaller fragments. Many younger people have inherited burnout alongside climate anxiety and economic precarity.
Birding offers something radically different.
Slowness. Observation. Locality. Wonder.
Birding slows you down. It allows you to stop and just be.
And unlike older forms of naturalism, apps like Merlin Bird ID lower the barrier to entry entirely. You no longer need years of specialist knowledge to begin listening closely to the living world around you. A phone held towards birdsong becomes a doorway into relationship.
The Merlin app itself has become something of a quiet cultural phenomenon. Developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the app has now been downloaded more than 33 million times across 240 countries, with Britain becoming one of its fastest-growing user bases.
What fascinates me most is how technology, for once, is not pulling people further away from nature but guiding them gently back towards it.
Perhaps this is why birding feels so important right now. Not because young people suddenly became interested in ornithology, but because attention itself has become political.
To pay close attention to a blackbird singing at 5am is to momentarily step outside the logic of algorithmic life. Birdsong cannot be optimised. A dawn chorus asks nothing from you except presence. No productivity. No branding. No performance. Just listening.
In a culture built to fracture attention constantly, birding becomes a quiet act of resistance.
Across Yorkshire, birding culture continues thriving in places where ecology still interrupts modern speed. At RSPB Bempton Cliffs, people gather every spring to watch puffins launching themselves from chalk cliffs into North Sea winds, their orange feet almost cartoonishly bright against the rockface. Along the Humber Estuary, migratory birds continue following aerial routes older than borders or nations. Wetland reserves like Blacktoft Sands and Potteric Carr Nature Reserve create pockets of stillness where marsh harriers, reed warblers and bitterns continue their lives largely indifferent to the algorithmic noise of the human world.
Sometimes I find myself wondering what birds I am hearing at Curbar Edge. What is singing overhead at Bolehills just before sunset. A kestrel hovering over moorland. Goldfinches bouncing through community gardens. Wood pigeons sounding strangely mournful across Hull rooftops after rain. The more you learn birdsong, the more impossible it becomes to move through the world absent-mindedly.
In Sheffield, my favourite place to walk is Wyming Brook Nature Reserve. It feels almost Jurassic. Huge rocks covered in moss. Ancient ferns unfolding beside a meandering river. Water moving over stones that seem older than language itself. Standing there, listening to birdsong echo through the valley, the nervous system begins slowing down almost against your will.
Places like Wyming Brook remind me that attention is ecological too.
Researchers studying dawn chorus soundscapes describe them as extraordinarily dense acoustic environments where multiple bird species overlap simultaneously before sunrise. But emotionally, the dawn chorus feels less like noise and more like collective presence. An entire ecosystem announcing itself awake.
Once you begin recognising birdsong, silence disappears. The world becomes crowded with voices you previously moved through without noticing. A chiffchaff repeating itself from a hedgerow. Goldfinches arguing overhead. Wrens singing far louder than their tiny bodies seem capable of. The landscape transforms from backdrop into relationship.
What strikes me most is how birding changes people. Not into experts necessarily, but into listeners.
And perhaps that is what younger generations are really searching for when they wake before sunrise with flasks of coffee and phones full of bird calls. Not escape from the world, but re-entry into it.
Because birding is not really about collecting sightings.
It is about learning how to pay attention again.