Last month I joined a field trip to the Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve hosted by the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society’s Young Birders Club, founded by local high school students Allison Cheng and Valerie Wong. I arrived as the walk was already beginning, and an 8-year-old boy spotted and identified a California towhee sitting atop some nearby brush. The group, comprised almost entirely of kids under 11 and their parents, stopped to get a good look before moving on.
Cheng, a junior at Mountain View High, said she was happy the turnout included many young kids who were new to birding, with a couple who were more experienced. She started the club with Wong, a junior at St. Francis High, over the summer to “inspire the care for and protection of birds in youth in a friendly, inclusive birding community for all birding interests and experience levels.”
What’s notable about the Young Birders Club members, including its teenage founders, is that very few of them were persuaded to get into birding because of their parents. Nearly always it was the other way around, with kids finding an interest in birding independently and parents looking to foster that interest despite not knowing a goose from a gull.
Birding bond
Parent Ram Iyengar said his son, Yathir, caught the birding bug when he watched the quintessential bird film “The Big Year” on a flight to Rome. Once they landed in Rome and Yathir saw the wild parakeets around the city, he was hooked. Of course, an elementary-school-aged kid can’t pick up a pair of binoculars and get himself to a birding spot at the crack of dawn, so Ram got into the hobby alongside him, which has been positive for his own mental health.
“Birding is meditative and cathartic,” Ram said. “We are in such a constant rat race in our daily lives, and birding forces you to listen and stay quiet.”
Yathir was the exact kind of person Cheng and Wong had in mind when starting the Young Birders Club, an offshoot of the main branch of SCVAS. They aimed to provide a resource that accommodated the needs of bird lovers ages 10-21, because they knew from experience there were few groups oriented toward the experience of young birders.
Cheng first got into birding as part of her school’s science Olympiad team freshman year, describing some of her first experiences with the hobby as “magical.” She encouraged Wong to join in, and she also quickly fell in love.
“It was during a pretty stressful time in my life a few years ago, so going out birding and being focused only on nature and not on anything else – that really helped me,” Wong said. “And now I feel like I can do something more meaningful with it through the club.”
“When we were looking for opportunities to get more involved in the birding community during high school, we were finding that there was kind of a lack of these opportunities because a lot of times, you have to be over 18 to volunteer or they just simply didn’t have opportunities to accommodate to our schedules while in school,” Cheng said. “And there also wasn’t really a space in the Bay Area where we could really talk about birds with other young birders, because most of the time these volunteers are going to be older folks. And we were thinking that if we started our own club, we could provide those opportunities for these young birders, and we felt that we had the experience and the passion necessary for that.”
Saving the environment
With help from SCVAS and outside organizations like the Environmental Volunteers (whose own Marion Krause guided the Baylands field trip), Cheng and Wong have built a new, healthy arm of the Audubon Society that not only allows kids an opportunity to attend field trips and learn about birds, but also to participate in community science projects, cultivate leadership skills and restore local habitats.
A big piece of any Audubon organization will involve conservation work, but young birders have even more of a vested interest in keeping the planet healthy and preventing the world population of birds from decreasing more than it already has in recent decades.
“We have a unique perspective as young people on climate change and the way habitats are being lost. We generally have a better understanding of the urgency of the issue. And then as young people, we also have unique creativity, like kids are much more likely to go out and follow their passions and become really absorbed in things,” Wong said. “And by combining people of all those different passions, and giving them opportunities to lead workshops … it can help people learn things that they might not normally not be aware of.”
“We felt it was really important to be opening up specifically to the younger generation, because this is the moment when they’re getting passionate about all these different things,” Cheng added. “If they can be recruited into birding and being passionate about saving the environment now, that is really important for the future of the Earth and with climate change and everything that’s coming.”
Cheng and Wong are scheduled to lead the next Young Birders Club field trip 8:30-10:30 a.m. Saturday at Cuesta Park, 516 Cuesta Drive, Mountain View. The group will be looking for resident birds, including red-tailed hawks, white-breasted and pygmy nuthatches, western bluebirds and potentially some incoming wintering sparrows. The trip is designed for young birders, but parents and siblings are welcome to attend, and loaner binoculars are available upon request. Registration is required.
To register for the field trip and for more information on the Young Birders Club, visit scvas.org/ybc.
