If you like reading a good memoir, or if you’re needing inspiration as Earth Day 2025 comes around, you should pick up Trish O’Kane’s 2024 volume, Birding to Change the World: A Memoir. It is, in her own words, a “braid of science, personal story, and an activism story” that comes as close to riveting as any memoir can. It’s the story of how a former investigative journalist, peace activist and hate crimes researcher who “wasn’t really connected to the soil, the waters, or any of the creatures that live in those places” became a passionate birder, community organizer and environmental educator. It makes for compelling reading because of the astuteness of O’Kane’s analysis of her own evolution, the humor she infuses into the narrative, and the recurring small—and eventually big—victories won against formidable odds.

The story begins in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of the New Orleans home O’Kane and her husband had just moved into. In her post-Katrina depression and disorientation, feeling a loss of control over everything, O’Kane feels the need of a replacement for her usual morning routine of taking in the day’s news. So, inspired by seeing the joy her dying father found in the birds in his backyard, she buys a bird feeder and some seed. “The next morning,” she writes, “I began a ritual that became a lifestyle: sitting on the back stoop with a cup of coffee and starting the day with ‘The Sparrow Show,’ live and in color.”

*House Sparrow, male adult and chicks, Ulster county, New York*
*Lauren Leudemann/Audubon Photography Awards*

Surprisingly, it was the humble and often despised House Sparrow that became her portal bird, the one that got her hooked on birdwatching. But it would be a long time before she purchased binoculars or practiced the hobby in the usual way. Rather, the antics of the morning sparrows, as well as the Monk Parakeets she discovered in the city, brought her the respite and refuge she desperately needed to get through living in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. And this theme of the healing and restorative powers of nature is a leitmotif of O’Kane’s journey, furnishing the principal motivation for her eventual community organizing and for her yet-to-be developed unique approach to environmental education, namely, engaging college students as mentors for school-age children as they discover nature through birding.

O’Kane’s meditations on the House Sparrow are just one example of the thoroughly researched and fascinating facts she includes about each of the birds she eventually comes to know. A couple of tidbits: since its migration from Africa to Europe some 12,000 years ago and its more recent (1850) importation into the U.S., it has been wreaking all kinds of havoc, including setting a thatched cottage roof on fire and, most incredibly, knocking down 23,000 dominoes out of 4,321,000 that had been painstakingly assembled to set a new Guinness World Record. While O’Kane understands and sometimes shares the strong emotions about this species, she believes “we hate house sparrows simply because they are so much like us.”

*Gray Catbird, Warren county, Pennsylvania*
*Sandra Rothenberg/Audubon Photography Awards*

When O’Kane realizes it is time for her to leave New Orleans, she ends up, almost despite herself, entering a Ph.D. program in Environmental Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a “giant leap” for her. When she encounters a Gray Catbird in her new backyard—as it is being terrorized by one of her dogs—she is curious about the bird’s winter haunts and so signs up for an advanced ornithology course because the university doesn’t offer “Birding for Dummies”. The following spring and summer, she discovers a host of avian residents of Warner Park, Madison’s second largest urban park, which happens to be across the street from her new home, along with its regular human visitors and devotees. Two years later, O’Kane learns that the part of the park which was a “major urban wildlife refuge” is now threatened by a plan for further development, even though “half of the park’s 213 acres was already covered by mowed grass, buildings, sports facilities, or parking lots.”

The remainder of the memoir recounts the surprising story of the birth and growth of Wild Warner, a small but loudly “squawking” local advocacy group, and its success against formidable odds to not only block the development but to bring about major improvements in the park’s wildlife-fostering habitat. While spearheading this effort along with her spouse and other allies, O’Kane completes an action-research Ph.D. project on the connections between the birds and environmental injustice with an emphasis on community organizing.

*American Bittern*
*Joseph Mahoney/Audubon Photography Awards*

This journey is punctuated by more encounters with an assortment of birds, from an unexpected American Bittern to bluebirds to woodcocks. Also encouraging the author—and the reader—are the heartwarming moments when school kids from a low-income neighborhood who are part of the birding club explain to their new college mentor some of the secrets of nature. “A seventh-grader explained the difference between a Cooper’s hawk and a red-tailed hawk to his college mentor, a former marine in Iraq in school on the GI bill. Another seventh-grader showed his college mentor the secret spot where the marsh turtles came out to sun themselves.”

This is a book full of much needed hope for the natural world and for our human species.

Source:

Trish O’Kane, Birding to Change the World: A Memoir. New York: Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2024.