Travel
Rare birds
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Wildlife
Melissa Hafting on the healing power of birds
The ecologist, photographer, activist and birding guide discusses her fascination with birds, bringing people together and how birdwatching can help people deal with grief
- Aug 07, 2024
- 1,082 words
- 5 minutes
For many birders, it all starts with a “spark.” A “spark bird,” to be specific — the first bird that ignites a bird watcher’s passion for birding. For birder Melissa Hafting, it was the black-capped chickadee.
Hafting’s fascination with birds began at the age of five when her father introduced her to birdwatching. Her early childhood memories include trips to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary in Delta, B.C., where she recalls feeding chickadees by hand. As she got older, Hafting’s love of birds grew with her. Fast-forward a few decades, and Hafting is now an accomplished and respected birder, photographer, and mentor whose work highlights the power birds have to heal and save us.
Her new book Dare to Bird: Exploring the Joy and Healing Power of Birds explores the joy that birding and photography have brought to her life. Through a series of powerful photographs, Dare to Bird showcases some of Hafting’s most captivating bird images captured throughout the United States and Canada.
In an exclusive interview, Canadian Geographic sat down with Hafting to discuss her successful career as a birder, inspiring young birders, how she has used birding to cope with mental health issues and more.
On how birding brings people together
Birding is a hobby that is for all different ages. It connects people of all different ages together, which is very unique. I have lots of friends that are much older than me and much younger. I started the BC Young Birders Program, which is for youth ages 12 to 18, and it really connected me more to youth because mentoring them has just brought so much joy to my life. They inspire me so much to keep working to protect birds and get outside in nature, and their enthusiasm for the conservation and protection of the birds is really inspiring to see.
Birding can bring people together from all different walks of life. There are so many different pathways to birding. You can be somebody who twitches [observing rare birds], or you can be someone who just does backyard birding. You can be elderly, you can be really young. It’s just for everybody.
On why she started the BC Young Birders Program
I started [the BC Young Birders Program] in 2014. I would go out birding, and I’d see all these teenage birders birding on their own, and I thought it would be good to bring them together in a group setting. And I asked them if they wanted to do that individually, and they all were really keen. So I started doing this program, taking them out on field trips across the province, overnight trips, pelagic boat trips, and seeing birds they don’t normally see in their own backyards.
I didn’t really have anyone mentoring me, and I didn’t see anybody that looked like me. I wanted to make it a very inclusive group — so BIPOC and LGBTQ+ inclusive — and promote that so people felt safe when they came. And it’s been really good. A lot of these kids that started in 2014, they’re still friends together. Many of them work in conservation and are biologists. It really seems to have ignited something in the youth here, and I still am running the program, and have about 25 kids across the province.
On what birding can bring to your life
In my book, I talk about how birds can bring peace, joy and comfort to a lot of people. Especially people who are grieving. Even if you’re not grieving, just going through daily stresses of life, like work and stuff, it just helps. When you get outside in nature, it gives you some peace and grounding. When you’re looking at birds, you can distract yourself from really stressful events in your life. I want people to know how much joy birds can bring, how rewarding that is to you, the peace it can bring into your life — and why it’s important to protect them.
On how birds can help people deal with grief
Birding can offer a distraction to the pain you’re feeling inside. When you’re grieving, there are a lot of things going on with your body, physically and emotionally, and the birds just help distract from that. It’s a mental and physical break away from that really heavy stuff. And you can just focus on the birds. It just makes you feel so much better.
Also, you can cry in front of birds. They don’t care if you feel sad. It just gives you so much comfort out there looking at them — it has for me, anyway. Lots of scientific studies have shown that they decrease heart rate and help people feel better who are coping with many illnesses, such as depression.
On what people can do to help birds
I think people can try to reduce their plastic use. Try to write their government officials to protect certain areas in their communities so that they don’t get destroyed. We’re losing so much critical bird habitat. I think just getting out there and looking at birds and supporting these green spaces that we do have in place so that these birds are protected for future generations because many of them are declining — most of them. If we don’t protect them, they won’t be around for us to get these rewards, like the joy and peace that I talk about and comfort. They’re beautiful to look at, but they also are important to our ecosystems. They’re all part of the food chain, and we really need them… for our wetlands, for everything.
On her favourite bird
My favourite bird is probably the rough-legged hawk. It’s really beautiful to watch it hover like an angel flapping its wings over its prey.
On photographing her dream bird
The dream bird that I wanted to photograph for so long was a Steller’s sea eagle. And I was able to photograph that last year in Trinity, Newfoundland. That was amazing for me to see that bird in North America. It’s usually in Japan and Russia. You usually have to go see those in the winter in Japan. And it was just amazing to see this absolutely humongous eagle with this big orange beak. It looks nothing like our bald eagle. To see that in Canada was pretty amazing — and I got to photograph it.
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