From the Winter 2025 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.
Ed Yong is spending a lot of time with dinosaurs these days. Or as we commonly call them, birds. He bemoans the oft-repeated fallacy that all dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago.
“I think of birds as the dinosaurs’ greatest triumph in a way,” Yong says.
“They fly. They underpin so many different ecosystems. They’re enormously varied and beautiful and often very intelligent.”
Yong is a science journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic while he was a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he worked from 2015 to 2023. But while he received the Pulitzer and other journalism awards for his medical science reporting, Yong’s heart has always been in writing about wildlife. He’s the author of two New York Times best-selling books, one on the sensory worlds of animals and the other on partnerships between animals and microbes.
“I cared about animals since I was old enough to care about anything,” Yong says.
Yet a couple years ago, Yong noticed that something was missing.
“I’ve written about nature for pretty much my entire career, but I felt a little bit disconnected from it,” he says. “I wanted to remedy that.”
Yong’s remedy meant quitting his steady magazine job and moving from Washington, D.C., to California.
“The bird life [in Oakland] is just so much more in your face,” he says. “When I moved into the house that I now own for the first time, there was an Anna’s Hummingbird perched on a small tree in the garden.”
Suddenly, nature—in the form of birds—was a constant in Yong’s life: Northern Mockingbirds calling at all hours of the night; Rock Wrens popping up on boulders along his hikes. Seeing and hearing a Pacific Wren singing was a spark moment for him.
As he began to explore his new home in Northern California, Yong realized he lived within easy reach of a wide range of ecosystems and birds. He can drive half an hour east and watch Golden Eagles soaring above mountain ridges; half an hour west and see Brandt’s Cormorants and Pigeon Guillemots swimming through San Francisco Bay. He can drive a mere 15 minutes to redwood forests and listen to Pacific Wrens and Northern Saw-whet Owls.
And not only can Yong now find all kinds of birds, he can also take the time to observe them. In the process, he says, he found out that there are “two sides to the birds.”
“One side is everything that I write about professionally and have cared about since I was a kid … their evolutionary history, their weird behavior, their anatomy and physiology, and all of the stuff that’s in the scientific literature,” Yong says. “And then the rest is all the context and minutiae of their lives. Where they go. How they behave. What they do. How they respond to the seasons and the times of day. It’s about their lived experiences.”
“I think that knowing these two sides, each of these greatly enriches the other,” he says. “I feel like I only ever had one part of it until I took up both birding, and [bird] photography last year.”
An “Immersion in the True Reality”
Last spring Yong penned an opinion essay for the New York Times entitled When I Became a Birder, Almost Everything Else Fell Into Place.
Yong wrote about the rapid progression of his “birder derangement syndrome,” and how he was finding that rather than an escape from reality, birding felt like an “immersion in the true reality.” After two decades of writing about birds as part of his science beat at the magazine, he feels like he’s seeing birds again, for the first time.
“It’s been really interesting to me, all the stuff that isn’t going to be in an Atlantic article or a Nature paper … like, I didn’t know that birds wipe their beaks on branches,” he says. “This is a behavior that they obviously do. I now see it all the time, but I just didn’t know until I was actually watching them.”
A desire to photograph the birds he was seeing came quickly on the heels of his launch into birding. With guidance from a photographer in an online birding community, Yong purchased a Canon R6 Mark II and 800-mm f/11 lens. Though at times the fixed focal length of the lens required him to back up from too-close birds, and the narrow aperture limited his ability to shoot in low light, it proved to be a good training lens.
Before long, Yong was able to photograph even blindingly fast Barn Swallows in flight. Recently, he switched to the more versatile Canon 200–800-mm f/6.3–9 zoom lens. He credits the bird-eye tracking and other features of his mirrorless camera as “indistinguishable from magic.”
And, he says the experience of looking at birds through a camera lens makes him feel even more connected.
“I find sometimes when I’m looking through the lens, the heightened feeling when you’re really trying to capture a good shot can sometimes make me pay attention to the bird in a way that I wouldn’t if I was just staring through the bins,” Yong says.
As an example, he references his recent experience trying to get a photo that he considers to be an embodiment of the Black Skimmer.
“Some birds … unless you see the bird doing that behavior, it always feels like you’ve only sort-of seen the bird. You haven’t seen the essence,” he says. “Like if you see a Black Skimmer roosting on a beach, but you don’t see it skimming the ocean.”
Yong says his skimmer shot isn’t perfect, “the lighting is not ideal,” but it captures “a Black Skimmer flying toward the camera, wings outstretched, reflected in the water, just skimming.”
The unpredictability of bird photography is also thrilling to Yong. With writing, he knows the exact mechanics of his craft: “what every section and paragraph and sentence is trying to achieve; it’s all massively deliberate and planned and carefully executed.”
But with photography, he says, “there is this huge stochastic element that I can’t control.
“I can be in the right position. I can anticipate what the bird’s going to do. And I can set my camera correctly. But there’s still that X factor that is completely beyond all of that.
“And there’s something very magical and liberating about trying to create art.”
Yong, who describes himself as a “quite restless person,” extols the power of birding and bird photography for mental health.
“I’m always thinking about stuff. I have anxieties. I have a lot of things in my mind. And when I’m out in the field looking through a [camera] lens or binoculars, a lot of that just falls away,” he says. “I’ve described it as being more meditative than actual meditation. It really does focus the mind. … You are putting all of your attention on this other creature, often a very innocuous, honest, unassuming creature. We all joke about like the little brown jobs, right?
“So you focus all of your energy and attention on this tiny brown sparrow, and it is the center of your world, for this fleeting moment.”
Yong isn’t active on social media, partly due to his recent pursuit to simplify and focus his life. But he is an avid user of eBird, where he posts bird photos alongside his checklists. For Yong, eBird is akin to a social network, providing him with a portal for information sharing with birders, yet without the ability to follow anyone or comment on their posts. He calls eBird “the only good social network remaining, in part because it doesn’t function like any other social network.”
At a recent public lecture, Yong compared social media and birding as alternate ways to spend his time.
“I spent a lot of my time and my life on social media [in the past], caring about what people who I don’t actually care about are saying and thinking, and wasting a huge amount of emotional and mental energy,” he says. “And now I spend an equivalent amount of energy trying to work out whether that small probing shorebird is a Western Sandpiper or a Semipalmated Sandpiper. And one of those things is a total waste of my time, and it’s desperately uncool. And it is not the sandpiper thing.”
The Rhythms of Bird Migration
Yong says he now marks the calendar by the birds. As late summer was approaching, he declared it to be “shorebird season in Oakland.” And when he scans the coastline for “peeps,” as he calls them, what he sees is informed by a career dedicated to accumulating and communicating knowledge about ecology.
For example, he says, “I know that every time a Red Knot shoves its beak into the sand, it’s creating a pressure wave, and then sensing how that wave is distorted by buried objects in the sand. A Red Knot can sense the presence of a clam beyond the reach of its own bill.”
Getting to know the comings and goings of shorebirds is a perfect example, Yong says, of the remedy—the connection—he sought when he headed to the West Coast.
“I care about the tides, and which kinds of tides [shorebirds] are most active in. I now think of where they forage versus where they roost, where they breed, how the plumage changes,” Yong says.
With his newfound appreciation of birds and photography, Yong is excited for an upcoming trip to New Zealand to do research for his next book. The prospect of seeing Bar-tailed Godwits—the bird world’s migration distance champion, capable of flying 7,500 miles nonstop—thrills him.
As he puts it, “even the most mediocre, average Bar-tailed Godwit is totally capable of flying across the world.
“Here is this feat of extreme athleticism. Human ultramarathoners are in the top 0.1% of athletic ability,” Yong says, but “it’s not like it’s just the best of the Bar-tailed Godwits that can do this. Your average Joe Schmo Bar-tailed Godwit can do this!”
As Yong embarks on the next chapter of his career—as a Californian, feeling more connected to nature; post-The Atlantic, but continuing to write and explore as a science journalist who’s curious about this amazing world of living things—he says he senses a big difference within him now, as a birder, compared to before.
“I remember writing a story for The Atlantic about that Science paper on the loss of 3 billion birds since 1970,” he says, in reference to the 2019 research that showed North American bird populations had plummeted by 29% in the past 50 years. “I felt some way about it, and then I put it aside.
“Now I feel that more viscerally. I’ve written about the shifting baselines problem, about how we normalize to the losses. There’s always a voice in the back of my mind now when I’m out birding, where I’m thinking about the birds that I’m not seeing—what I should be seeing. And then I’m thinking about what this same site will look like in 10 years’ time or 20 years’ time.
“I feel like I have more skin in the game now.”
