Every Saturday at 9am, an average of 85 people go birdwatching year-round at McGolrick Park in North Brooklyn. Photo: Louisa Belk.
Michael Lombardo, McGolrick Bird Club Host | April 2, 2025
We're in a humble nine-acre park. The aesthetic is classic New York City: benches along pathways, remnant cobblestone, a historically registered pavilion, and two handsome monuments—tributes to local World War I heroes and the builders of the USS Monitor.
One third is playground. An entire corner is dog run. Majority flora: towering London Planetrees over mangled lawns. There are no water features to speak of, save occasional threads of runoff from a drinking fountain, a garden hose, a splash pad.
From a birder's-eye view, McGolrick Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, doesn’t look like much—just another primate-forward public space. And yet, every Saturday at 9am, an average of 85 people go birdwatching. Year-round.
I write "people" because to call them birders wouldn't be quite right. Yes, binoculars swing from craning necks. But in an eye-widening inversion of your typical outing’s demographics, only a handful are avid birders—most of them recently sparked, in situ. The average age is 30, and 1 in 5 are first-time attendees. Most first-timers have never birdwatched.
So instead of backpacks, we see BAGGU. Instead of bird hats, thrift store trophies. Instead of GORE-TEX… GORE-TEX x Aimé Leon Dore. We might call this oddly plumaged collective "the Unlikely."
According to news reports, some uneasy mix of pandemic fallout, climate anxiety, and social media fatigue has spawned more birders than ever. Okay, but… I do a lot of noticing. It remains painfully obvious to me that too few people bird, let alone care about birds.
My hypothesis: While those already inclined to become birders are more activated than ever, a critical population of unlikely, could-be birders is, without our help, doomed to notice little more than pigeons, a perched hawk or two, “seagulls”—doomed to sleepwalk through our animate, avian world.
Spark birds and awakened senses
I myself am an unlikely birder. No formal life sciences training. Suspicious of nature lovers. (No offense.) Historically bored on a hike. My people are city folk, artists, designers, addicts, skateboarders. Not that birders don’t overlap with these groups. They do. But when a Hooded Oriole sparked me in 2019, and I tried to articulate my transformation to everyone I knew—everyone I knew replied: "Are you okay?"
There’s this huge gap between what “normal” people think birding is and what birders feel. The first time I paid attention to birds—like many recent-ish initiates, Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing inspired me to try—finding the Hooded Oriole was intuitive and profound. Here I was, all reawakened senses, alive to the everyday sacred, basically inhabiting a Mary Oliver poem, and—perhaps most exhilarating to my inner skater—enacting an anti-establishment/punk rage against our dominant phone-culture machine.
But “birdwatching" as a practice, so stereotypes told me, is for asocial obsessives, hobbyists, safari-hat wearers, list tickers, Pokémon Go collectors.
To go from not thinking one bit about birds and even considering birdwatching goofy, to this visceral understanding that noticing them makes you more human—more alive? I want everyone, especially the Unlikely, to have that experience.
My first time birding McGolrick was compulsory. It's the fall of '22. I'm a new dad with little paternal instinct but enough common sense to skip my favorite hours-long trips around Prospect Park.
McGolrick is near our apartment. I walk there during the baby’s naps, for 15-minute loops. My expectations are low: the usual, human-adapted suspects? Sure. A jay or cardinal? Maybe. If I'm lucky, I figure, I'll notice one of the less common birds a few intrepid eBirders logged during migrations past.
A flash of movement shocks my half-hearted session back to life. Binoculars up and… warbler… tiger stripes!
Readers of this newsletter surely know the slack-jawed awe inspired by a surprise Cape May. Perhaps you also know—after reflexively looking around for witnesses but only finding phone touchers—that complementary, almost maddening feeling:
How can so many people inhabit this world without noticing anything at all?
The Genesis of Bird Club
The idea for McGolrick Bird Club, what the weekly outings I host have come to be called, is to bridge the gap between our insular world of birding and a public in need of reconnection to the natural world. There’s nothing especially revolutionary about a regular patch meet-up or an introductory birding outing. But I try to create the shortest, most crossable bridge possible.
The consistent, impossible-to-miss crowds suggest something is connecting. So, once in a while someone asks me how McGolrick Bird Club works.
I point to the park as a neighborhood nexus, the Unlikely-friendly start time, the arsenal of spare binoculars, and the romance of patch birding—the lore, the heartbreak, and the magical sense that you’re in your own secret garden.
I also share these practical steps:
Advertise.
Like most public spaces, McGolrick is supported by a passionate group of local volunteers who organize park programming. I introduced myself to them at a Farmer’s Market and got their help posting about my plan.
Show up.
Two people came to the first outing. I committed to weekly meet-ups anyway. Can less frequent events build real community? Maybe, maybe not. Does this commitment cut into my own sacred field trip time? Yes. Is it worth it? For me, getting another county bird for the year is less fun than getting 100 could-be birders on a Northern Flicker.
Host.
Does the idea of speaking to a barbarian birdwatcher horde make you tense up? If so, I feel you—I’m an introvert at heart. A lifetime of occasionally successful adaptations to our cruel extroverted world means I’ve acquired a party host trick or two.
I think of party goers as dancing bacteria in a messy, but ultimately healthy, microbiome. The goal? To be a gracious probiotic. Do:
Remember returnees’ names (you’re a birder; you’ve got this)
Organically introduce people to one another
Ensure that newbies feel welcomed and comfortable—especially among cliques—and that first-timers get on as many potential spark birds as possible
Usher the vibe, always, back to fun and awe
Whiteboard.
Inspired by the dry-erase bird lists common to wildlife refuge visitor centers, I bought a whiteboard, markers, and sandbags ($50, $10, and $20, respectively). Before each walk, I prepare a short lesson on an expected species or draw side-by-side images. At the end, we recount the birds we noticed and I jot them down. (Imagine strangers yelling species names they just learned at you. It’s dope.)
I leave the board out all day. To my own surprise, it's only rarely defaced. (Exclusively, it seems, by excited toddlers.) The thinking here is words like flicker, tanager, parula—or my drawings: “folk-art-inspired” if you’re being kind—grab the attention of passersby.
At dusk, when I go to retrieve the whiteboard, I often find myself waiting while people finish reading it. My conclusion is that the board’s totemic power, more than anything else, keeps our first-timer rate high.
Talk about things that affect the Unlikely.
We live in an age akin to the cigarette-happy 1950s. But instead of smokes, people can’t stop lighting up their phones. Social media, just like tobacco, is noxious but addictive. Viral content exploits our precognitive appetite for outrage, fear, and disgust. It harms our discourse, our politics, our culture. (Your correspondent, a recovering tech worker himself, understands this better than most.)
But then, like the deus ex machina that thwarts the aliens in a science-fiction tale, birdwatching, at least momentarily, stops the invasion—inoculates its practitioners against the mind-snatchers’ algorithms.
I rarely hear birders talk about the practice’s surprising capacity to protect our world’s at-threat humanness—to save the day. To me, it’s the single most powerful, unifying truth of birding. One that includes, but also extends beyond a focus on inclusion and access, into something even more fundamental.
McGolrick Park isn’t the most obvious place to bird. No wetlands, no sweeping meadows—just an unassuming, superfund site-adjacent patch in North Brooklyn. But every Saturday, something happens. Humans gather, binoculars in hand, and begin to notice.
I see it happen. I watch the Unlikely pause, look up, and suddenly see—not just a woodpecker or a warbler, but the whole, pulsing web of life around them. I see them come back the next week, then the next, with new eyes, new questions, new friends, new wonder. I see them try Merlin and iNaturalist and eBird—some even go on to haunt Kings County’s rare bird alerts and Top 100 Birders List. I see them become birders. I see them awaken.
It doesn’t take much—just a moment of noticing, a single spark, an authentic nudge toward wonder. And once the Unlikely start craning necks—over BAGGUs or binoculars—how could they ever stop?
McGolrick Bird Club meets every Saturday, rain or shine, at 9am at the corner of Russell x Driggs in North Brooklyn’s McGolrick Park. Just show up! To learn more, subscribe to Michael Lombardo’s newsletter, “The Noticer’s Monthly.”
