Good Company

A thing that surprised me at my first international birding festival was how young, active, and frankly hip the birders I met were. That’s on me for showing up with the wrong idea of who birders are. I’d half-expected a crowd of octogenarian, judgy curmudgeons who would chase me off “their” bird and yell at me if I got an ID wrong. What I found instead was team spirit and camaraderie. Everyone was genuinely excited to share their best stories and sightings.

There’s a lot of that spirit right where I live and work, too. So this isn’t a list of causes you should support. It’s a short introduction to some groups that have helped me, and that can help you. Every one of them gives something away for free, and most of what they offer doesn’t require anything from you.

Probably the most open and welcoming group I’m a member of is the Grand Rapids Audubon Club. They do guided bird walks, classes, a book club, bird trivia nights, and monthly meetings, usually with interesting speakers. The best part is it’s all free, and all open to anyone, member or not. You can quite literally just show up. You can also be a member and not show up to anything if that’s your thing.

If you’d rather wander on your own, Michigan Audubon owns and runs bird sanctuaries across the state, many of them open to the public, free, from dawn to dusk. Pick one, go, and see what’s around.

Another group whose values I align with is The Nature Conservancy. They protect habitat at a scale that’s hard to picture: flyways and nesting grounds across the state and well beyond it. Some of the animals I love to see can’t get by on a backyard or a city park; they need large stretches of protected, connected habitat, and groups like this make sure those places don’t slowly succumb to development. Without preserved habitat, a lot of the migrant birds might simply stop coming back, even if the ground sustaining them is a plot of conservancy land up in the U.P. that I’ll never set foot on.

The Land Conservancy of West Michigan does that same work, but right here at home. They protect and open up preserves you can actually walk, across eight West Michigan counties, and they go a step further: they help ordinary landowners protect their own patches of ground. If reading about the natives I planted made you wonder about your own yard, these are the folks who can help.

For the most part, all of this is given freely, no membership card required. If at some point you feel compelled to join in, by becoming a member, donating, or volunteering a Saturday, every one of these groups will gladly take the help, and I’ll point you to how. But there’s no obligation here, and there never will be. Showing up, paying attention, and enjoying what they’ve made possible is more than enough.