Watch and Wonder: Birding as a Spiritual Practice

Birding can nourish our spiritual lives.

Birdwatching is a delight, a deepening. It puts us in touch with the ineffable, and it draws us toward self-denial for the sake of love. Birding brings us close to hope, abundance, and joy. In fact, it looks a lot like prayer.

From having his vision opened by a rare flycatcher, to learning the power of naming while watching shorebirds, to forging friendships on a Christmas Bird Count, naturalist, birder, and Episcopal priest Ragan Sutterfield delves into how birdwatching shapes our souls. He writes of turning yards into refuges for birds on their long migration. Even as we reckon with the inconsolable grief of habitat loss and species decline, he writes, birds can give us hope amid the desolation.

Readers of Margaret Renkl, Drew Lanham, and Terry Tempest Williams will find a kindred spirit in Sutterfield as he explores, in verdant and lyrical prose, the spirituality of birding over a year of watching, waiting, and wondering. In each chapter, Sutterfield names a particular way in which paying attention to birds shapes our souls and draws us toward awe. Twelve virtues and practices rooted in the Christian tradition--including joy, attention, slowness, kenosis, and friendship--are nurtured within us as we wait and watch and wait some more. Watching birds, we move toward sacramental sight: looking at the visible to find the holy hidden behind it.

Winged wonders that delight and sometimes disappoint, birds are ever within and beyond our vision. Whether you are a serious birder with an extensive life list or a casual observer of hawks along the highway, this book is an invitation to wonder and awe. It only takes paying attention.

Ragan Sutterfield is a priest in the Episcopal Church and serves a parish in his native Arkansas. His writing has appeared in a variety of places, including Men's Journal, The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Sojourners, The Oxford American, Plough, and Birding Magazine. Sutterfield's books include This Is My Body, The Art of Being a Creature, Wendell Berry and the Given Life, and Cultivating Reality. He seeks to live the good life with his wife, Emily, and two daughters, Lillian and Lucia, on their small urban homestead.