To watch birds is to watch yourself

Wednesday, 13 May 2026

Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.

OPINION: Bird-watchers these days don’t like to be called bird-watchers. The name suggests an anorak. They even more don’t like to be called twitchers. The name suggests a tic. Instead, and taking the lead from their American cousins, they prefer to be called birders. Birding suggests an active and manly engagement with a quarry, as in, say, fishing.

The difference they have overlooked, however, is that those who go fishing often eat their quarry, while those who go bird watching by and large don’t. Unless, that is, you count ticking birds off in a book as a form of consumption, and I suspect some of them do. For bird watching has become competitive.

The top birders want the longest list of sightings and the rarest birds. They will leap on a plane and travel thousands of miles to catch a glimpse of a variegated fairy tern that has been blown off course when migrating. And when they reach the alien shore they find hundreds of their fellow birders already lined up with telephoto lenses the size of field guns trained on a single bedraggled bird. It is so very American capitalist to take a gentle, appreciative pastime and render it expensive and competitive.

The first bird-watcher was God. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your father.” Hamlet put the same idea more succinctly: “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”. Both the Bible and Hamlet are suggesting that God is everywhere and always, and so are sparrows. In the case of sparrows they are bang on. The house sparrow is the world’s most widely distributed wild bird.

As the name suggests, it’s an urban creature. Where we go it goes. There isn’t an airport terminal in New Zealand that doesn’t have a few beneath its roof, scouring the café tables for morsels. It is the dowdiest bird on earth and no bird-watcher watches it. But it watches them.

Every morning I set out food on a bird table. As I do so I sense a rustling in the bushes. I am being birdwatched. Before I am even back inside, the sparrows have mobbed the table. In keeping with their plumage they head straight for the blandest food. They like bread, rice.

I watch them over breakfast. They are utterly gregarious. They have collective courage, individual timidity. If one arrives, they all arrive. If one takes fright the flock erupts in a whirr of wings.

On Brittan Terrace there’s a palm tree of sorts, and at dusk each evening every house sparrow in Lyttelton descends on it to roost in a frenzy of chirping. To watch them is to sense their delight in their own kind.

But there’s another sparrow. When the table’s been cleared, and all the other birds have gone in search of better pickings, the hedge sparrow arrives, shyly, diffidently, always alone. It skulks around the scene of the recent feasting, pecking at invisibilities. In contrast with the loud joviality of its cousin it seems restrained, even refined. A meditative solitary bird, an ascetic, an eremite, unswayed by the crowd. No coward soul is the hedge sparrow. It steers its own path. It is its own bird.

And as I watch the two sparrows, house and hedge, I find myself switching allegiance from one to the other and back again: extrovert, introvert; gregarious, reclusive; clubbable, loner; pub-goer, hermit. Which of us is not both?

For Hamlet, a play should hold the mirror up to nature. At the same time nature holds the mirror up to us. To watch birds is to watch yourself.