Listen, I know I’m old. There are no songs on my running playlist from after 2010. All my jeans are skinny jeans. Regarding the online discourse of the week, I’m glad things have changed but I nevertheless wish airports still had smoking lounges. So of course it finally happened: earlier this week I got up at 6am to go wander around the park looking at birds, and then I played a video game about it.
Birding boomed in popularity during the pandemic, and now it feels like all my friends are super into it. I had largely resisted this trend; the things I most enjoy doing outdoors–running and biking–involve moving quickly rather than staying in one place. But I do sometimes pass by birds and wonder what they are, especially when they’re colorful or I’ve never seen them before. I’ve gamely tried to Google birds I’ve seen on occasion, but I’ve never known what to do with that information beyond going “huh, neat” or the one time I thought I was going to be eaten alive by monsters while camping only to learn that I was actually hearing barred owls.
My inspiration to go birding with a friend was mostly wanting to start my day doing something other than being accosted by Slack and spreadsheets immediately upon opening my eyes. It was nice to wake up and get to go outside, to actively stare at trees and water instead of my computer. We went with a little group that meets up regularly, and the leader knew a lot of things about birds. Or, to me as a birding noob, a lot: their names and behaviors and where they like to hang out and why it was interesting that they were here in New York instead of somewhere else, all things I’d never considered much before.
I’ll admit I didn’t think birding required any particular skills and that wow, I was wrong about that. I was quickly schooled in the fact that, having not used binoculars since I was a kid, I am somehow terrible at them: I’d be staring at a bird with my meat eyes, only to put the binoculars to my face and immediately be unable to find it again. I got a little better at it over the course of the morning, but it’s definitely something to work on. I also learned that birding requires a kind of patience I assume I have but maybe do not. The birds don’t just sit there waiting for you to see them, and once you do see them, they don’t just stay in one place. The tiny ones are especially fast, and I spent a lot of the morning listening to the other people in the group exult over a bird while I tried not to whine “where did it go?” like a petulant child.
Despite being introduced to the possibility of being deficient in “looking at birds,” I came home feeling pretty pleased about the morning. When I finally relented and opened my computer, it felt like a wonderfully well-timed coincidence that Giovanni Colantonio at Polygon had written about a new birdwatching game called Flock Around, which looks like a combo of Flock and–admittedly my least favorite thing in games–camera quests.
Flock Around can be played solo or with up to 10 friends. You’re set loose in a blocky, brightly-colored woods, and you walk around looking for real-life birds and then taking pictures of them. Getting good pictures of a bird in four poses–back, front, side, and flying–earns you stars that unlock new areas, where you can find more birds to take pictures of. All your pictures earn you money, which you can use to buy cosmetics and bird seed or upgrade your camera and binoculars.
Flock Around requires some of the same skills I have only just learned I don’t have through real-life birding. You need to spot the birds, and then get close enough to actually frame them up in your view. Getting good pictures requires patience and timing; I have yet to get anything approximating a bird flying, because the moment it takes off I lose it completely, just like I did with real-life binoculars. There’s less of the game of chance that real-life birding seems to be–it’s a video game after all, where all the birds you need have been placed in its world by a designer instead of by the whims of nature or God or however you make sense of the experience of being alive–but birds can still be tricky to find.
I love a virtual wilderness, so I’m enjoying wandering around the different areas I’ve unlocked so far, listening out for the rattle of the woodpecker I need for my collection or hearing an unfamiliar bird call and trying to trace it to its origin. Played solo, it’s been a meditative game, even as I’m confronted with my own impatience and greedy need to unlock every area as quickly as possible. I am never going to truly enjoy using a camera in a game, but the rating requirements of the photos does encourage me to slow down and spend time actually observing the birds rather than just seeing them as items to check off a list. The game’s art style isn’t super detailed, so the birds aren’t the imaginative masterpieces of something like Flock, but I enjoy that they’re real birds, and maybe they’ll help me learn more about the birds I might see around me when I go birding again.
It’s not lost on me that the whole reason I went birding was to not look at my computer and that I have immediately turned that into looking at the computer again, given my habit of getting excited about video game versions of real-life things I’m interested in. But I’m glad to have been turned on to Flock Around; I still intend to go find real birds in the real world beyond my PC, but it’s also nice to be able to hone my nascent birdwatching skills without having to think about how I should really change the insoles in my shoes next time so I don’t aggravate my bum knee.
Riley MacLeod
