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Birding—also known as birdwatching—is filled with soft wonder. My own start was quite unexpected: last summer, my dog and I were amazed to see a giant hawk resting on a telephone pole in my boyfriend’s front yard, making a call so loud that it muffled the scurrying sounds of bush dwellers nearby. After seeing this creature—which I later identified as a red-shouldered hawk—at the same time everyday during our walk, I became inspired by how similar we were in our love of routines. The next thing I knew, a pair of binoculars sat atop my holiday wishlist.

While birdwatchers such as myself start looking to the skies for different reasons, we all reap similar restorative benefits from the hobby. Olivia Sanderfoot, a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), for example, started birding during her senior year in college. “My family was going through a very tough and challenging time,” she explains. While she’d tried yoga, therapy, and meditation to make her feel better, nothing seemed to work. “But I always felt better when I went birding. It became this self-imposed therapeutic practice that took me out of my grief and helped me connect with the environment.”

This said, today California wildfires are spreading more quickly and covering much more land mass, often at unmanageable rates for species. As juvenile birds, black-backed woodpeckers seek refuge in places with canopy coverage. They need live, intact forests to take shelter in and protect themselves from predators. As a result, even “fire specialists” can’t cope when hot and unruly conflagrations scorch the trees and bushes with no mercy.

Tule geese are another species struggling to cope with the climate change-induced increase of wildfires. In 2020, the ornithologist Cory Overton tracked their migration patterns. Every fall, the geese reliably reach their destinations at predictable times as they fly from the north shore of Alaska to California’s Central Valley with one stopover at a lake in Oregon. During 2020’s unprecedented disastrous fires in the Pacific Northwest, however, Overton noticed something peculiar: the geese took four extra days to reach their Oregon lake, presumably having expended an enormous amount of extra energy than they had allocated for their carefully timed travel. Many of the geese stopped on the waters and halted their migration entirely, seemingly to wait out the smoke coming from the wildfires.

Solorio invited me to join him on his weekly observation—a mile long walk on a trail in his backyard—to show the rich diversity of Los Angeles’ foothills. With long strides, he chats excitedly about the yellow hooded oriole and black phoebes he saw just an hour earlier. He also mentions how one time, he completed his weekly observation while on his way to a Taco Bell—a reminder of how easy it is to think about, care about, and coexist with birds. “I’ve been so enamored by community science,” he says, referring to the tradition of science work taken on by the public that Project Phoenix is a part of. “Growing up I never knew it existed. Now I’ve realized I can really make a meaningful contribution to scientific developments. I’m so grateful for that opportunity and I’m happy to continue to do this as long as I physically can.”