Birding to Change the World

Author: Trish O’Kane

Genre:

Format: Physical Purchase

Publish Date: February 2024

Read: August 2024

Favorite Quote: Avians have probably been teaching our species for the estimated half a million years we’ve been on the planet. The earliest human art shows that they were among our very first teachers.

Synopsis: Trish O’Kane is an accidental ornithologist. After years of investigative journalism in Central and South America, O’Kane finds herself a teacher at Loyala, engaged, and a new homeowner in New Orleans in 2005. When Hurricane Katrina wiped out everything, including her home, vehicle, and neighborhood, O’Kane found refuge in the birds that continued to visit New Orleans after the storm. Her love for these birds deepened until she found herself in a graduate program in Madison, Wisconsin. Still processing the losses following Katrina, O’Kane’s birding grew to a city-wide movement to protect the natural park and wetlands in Madison and started a children’s program to get inner-city kids interested in ecology, nature and, of course, birds.

Why does this book beguile? Birding to Change the World is a wonderful blend of memoir, nature, and activism rolled into one book. Trish O’Kane starts the journey in 2005, a few months before Hurricane Katrina's catastrophic landfall. Weaving in her strict Irish Catholic upbringing, O’Kane shares her reconciliation with her father through birding and his encouragement to go to Madison for her graduate program. The realization of activism through birding is slow, but the book is quick. I found myself turning page after page, wondering what happens to the birds, the kids, and the city itself.

After finishing the book, I was left feeling hopeful that more programs like this can help humans and nature reconnect and live in harmony, rather than at odds with one another.

Rating: 5/5

Link*: Birding to Change the World by Trish O'Kane

If you’re interested in this, read*: Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit by Lyanda Lynn Haupt