Ian Bell was 15 the first time he went looking for birds in Central Park alone in 2021, waking most mornings before school to walk the park with a pair of binoculars, oftentimes the only teenager doing so.
“I remember starting birding and being very lonely,” Bell told Fortune. “I had no one to bird with who wasn’t 20 years older than me.”
But now, five years later, he co-runs a Discord server with 4,400 members who alert each other about bird sightings—one small sign of a boom that shows up everywhere from Cornell University’s suddenly crowded birding club to federal surveys showing birding participation among 25-to-34-year-olds has quadrupled since 2016.
While birding is joining a Gen Z analog hobby boom as more young people are trying to go offline after the screen exhaustion of the pandemic, technology has also played a role in making birding more accessible.
Merlin, the free bird-identification app run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, went from over 279,000 U.S. users in July 2019 to over 4.8 million in July 2026 and helps beginners identify common bird species using Cornell’s eBird database.
“Bird watching, I think, used to be sort of a very, very niche thing, and now it is a cool thing,” Christopher Wood, the director of eBird, told Fortune. “It’s a mechanism that gets people outside and gets people in touch with nature, and then a percentage of those people start really understanding, learning those birds, and then they put their phone away completely.”
While Merlin doesn’t track age data, more young people showing up to bird is evidenced by the National Audubon Society’s growing presence on college campuses. Its campus chapter count has gone from zero to 117 in the past six years, and the organization is seeing “a surge in our supporters in their 20s and 30s” on social media, a spokesperson told Fortune over email.
But ask young people how they actually started birding, and few mention a bird at all.
Birding meets Gen Z’s yearning for mentorship and community
More than identifying birds and sitting in nature, part of birding’s appeal as a hobby is the people who set off the initial interest.
Shawn Wallace, 22, didn’t plan on becoming a birder, but got into it after his college resident advisor invited him to go fishing and find a tufted duck, common in Europe but rare in New York.
“We spent like four hours looking for it, and we didn’t find it,” Wallace told Fortune. “But then after that, whenever he went out, I tried to go out with him and I just continued down the rabbit hole.”
Jennifer Lodi-Smith, a psychologist at Canisius University who has spent four years collecting birders’ origin stories, encountered similar examples again and again.
She said more than two-thirds of the roughly 600 stories in her data set—including 96 from Gen Z respondents—are interpersonal rather than about the bird themselves, something that also applies to Lodi-Smith’s birding journey.
“I don’t have a single spark-bird moment,” she told Fortune. “I have spark people.”
Indeed, Wallace’s advisor, Robert Buckert, helped connect him to other birders who showed Wallace the ropes and the spots to go, with even the older crowd of birders being “great people.”
Buckert, a long-time birder himself, explained that birding’s strength is its “giving and wonderful community full of mentors” that welcomes young people and gives them a place to learn and belong, something they’re missing in the digital age.
“When you’re surrounded by all these people that take you under their wing, pun intended, and mentor you so strongly, then you just get kind of swept into that,” he told Fortune. “It’s not just the craving for the outdoors. It’s also that one-on-one mentor to mentee thing that people are dying for. It’s a great avenue for camaraderie and to learn from your elders.”
Now Wallace, who was Buckert’s first mentee, tries to get other people into birding as well.
“I’ve convinced at least, or maybe helped convince, three people to buy a bird feeder for their backyard, or at least 10 people to download the Merlin app,” he said.
