One of the great things about birds is that they're pretty much everywhere on Earth.

They live in nearly every terrestrial habitat, and they fly through the skies, and of course we also find them out on the ocean, far from any land.

That means that, whether or not you're looking for birds, chances are there are some nearby. In fact, even when you're not looking for them, you sometimes realize you're surrounded by birds of many species, or in large numbers.

But here's the funny thing. When you decide to deliberately look for birds, when you grab your binoculars and head out to go birding, the sneaky little

buggers can be shockingly hard to find. So birding is often a test of patience, persistence,

and skill. These and other traits often need to work in concert to locate a particular bird species

or to find a significant portion of the bird

diversity hidden in a patch of forest or wetland or wherever. If you're an experienced birder,

this might seem like second nature by now. You've put in the countless hours, the reps,

needed to build the skills and the mindset.

But to the average person walking down the street who isn't tuned into the world of birds,

well, frankly, they're probably not tuned into the world around them at all because they're

looking down at and completely absorbed by their phone. To that person, finding a little

brown bird in a tangle of thick shrubbery might seem like black magic, like an arcane art.

And even people new to birding might feel like locating a bird is often frustratingly hard,

and I remember feeling that way for sure.

But I've been a birding tour leader for about ten years now. I've had many moments out

bird out bird outburning with my group where I spot some little bird tucked up in the canopy

or wherever, and someone turns to me and says, how did you even see that? How did you know it was there?

The actions I had taken to find the bird were second nature to me.

No big deal, really.

But to that person, it seemed like I had some preternatural sixth sense.

...