I used to think birds made life worth living only for those of us obsessed with them. Now I know the truth | Sean Dooley

FEven for a long time, I thought that I and my obsessive comrades were the only ones for which the birds put life that was worth living. The pure delight that the birds brought to my life were both the remedy – and perhaps the instigator of – the social clumsiness of my adolescence. But then in my 19th tumultuous 20s, when everyone I knew seemed to cross a kind of painful emotional disorder, it appeared to me that birds could have a powerful meaning beyond the rib of birds.

One day, I had an elevator with a friend who really had trouble. As she went into the streets of the city center, sobbing uncontrollable, things started to look like this Vanilla Sky scene when Cameron Diaz drives Tom Cruise on a bridge. I convinced her to stop and we parked under trees. While I sat down, without any way to relieve his distress, a white honeyeater was flying and started jumping in front of us, looking for insects.

Watching this sweet little bird prolonging was the circuit breaker we needed. Completely indifferent to our problems, he connected us to something bigger, putting our problems in perspective and brought a feeling of magical wonder to be simply alive. I am not so woo-wo to claim that the appearance of a single bird was an instant healing, but its presence brought a moment of peace and thanks to what had been desperate.

Recent studies have shown that this experience is not unique. The game of birds in hospital has been shown to reduce the levels of pain and anxiety reported in patients as well as the reduction in the average time spent before the district. A 2020 European study has shown that 14 additional bird species in your neighborhood increases the general levels of happiness equivalent to the same boost that people would get if they were starting to earn $ 150 more.

The Australian vote of the bird of the year is a gloriously silly reflection of this sense that birds bring to our lives. Even his false competitiveness only adds pleasure.

Birds mean so many different things for different people, so selecting the 50 candidates for this year’s vote was a huge enigma for me and my colleagues Birdlife Australia. I had to put aside my personal preferences – my hero’s bird, the white honey, did not even make the list. In the end, we chose birds that we thought that most people would know either like the works of Kookaburra and Australian, or species that we think that people deserve to know.

Birds like the adorable fairy. Imagine make a retrograde version of a seagull and put an elegant black cap with a bright yellow invoice and you have a fairy stern. As if they were not sufficiently endearing, the fairy is the inventor of the fisherman’s dance! Michael Palin had to be inspired to look at the ritual of the nuptial parade where a male fairy sterne has a female with a small fish and slap it gently on her face before presenting it. If she eats the fish, then it’s the game and they will start building and scratching in the sand for their nest.

It is this nesting strategy that jeopardizes them. Because they choose to nest on the same beaches as we like that our summer playgrounds, without adequate protection, any disturbance for birds is disastrous for chicks. Adults are forced to leave the nest so often that the mortality of chicks goes through the roof because the small divest balls are cooked, were done or are taken by predators such as silver gulls or the only cat that destroyed an entire nesting colony near Mandurah.

Or birds like the magnificent red goshawk, a bird so rare that I never managed to see it once. It was such an exciting encounter that I always tremble in memory of being in its imperative presence. It is now the rarest bird of prey in Australia. Once we find as far south as Sydney, red goshawk is now confined to a handful of breeding pairs across the northern distant due to the continuous clearance of the woods on which they count.

If I have to vote for a bird, it will probably be the regent Honeyeater, an impressive wooded bird decorated with an black and white cutting pattern on the chest, with the radiant yellow – like the distilled Australian sun – hidden in its wings and its tail. It is a bird so in danger by the loss of habitat that young men lose their song of nuptial parade due to so few adults remaining so that they can learn.

While Twitchers may have experienced the existence of the Honeyeater Regent, until the Australian Bird of the Year’s survey started in 2017, almost no one else did. Today, there are entire communities working with Birdlife Australia and the members of the national recovery team to try to bring their song to the landscape.

This is what lives me the most at Bird of the Year. It is not only a happy celebration of the birds that saves us, but a rallying cry for us to work harder to save them. Let them start!

• Sean Dooley is an Australian writer, an ecologist and a bird. He is the editor -in -chief of Australian Birdlife Magazine, author of The Big Twitch