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.

 
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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.

 
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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.