Toward Birds, for Whom?
A review of Lili Taylor's "Turning to Birds" (2025).
Taylor, Lili. Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing. New York: Crown, 2025.
About 15 years ago, she writes in Turning to Birds, the actor Lili Taylor “started to sense birds in a deeper way.” She retreated from her Brooklyn apartment to her second home in upstate New York during a career break and found that birds unlocked a broader, deeper perception of the world. Since then, she has led efforts in conservation fundraising and awareness, as well as serving on the boards of several bird-related organizations.
Taylor’s essay collection, which came out yesterday from Crown, enters the canon of bird books in which the author—later in life than the expert birders or professional ornithologists—finds new meaning in the birds that have been there all along. But the explorations recounted in the book tend toward the shortsighted.
Taylor identifies attention, an act of stretching-towards reflected in the word’s etymology, as central to her methods of inquiry. The fullest observation takes the object on its own terms—“you make room for the other by clearing away motives and assumptions so you can take it in its totality”—and grants it its own subjectivity. Devoted care and dedicated work then allow us to find the stories we need in order to connect on the deepest levels. Fans of Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles or Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing will enjoy Taylor’s enthusiasm for practices of attention.
“One thing I’ve learned by watching birds is that there’s always a story. If you stay a few more moments than you’d prefer to, if you resist the urge to move on, get going, get busy, look at your phone—if you just keep watching the bird, that’s when it happens. The it is simply life: experiencing, imagining, feeling, breathing, sharing.”
—Lili Taylor, Turning to Birds
Taylor finds again and again, whether in the New Mexico desert or a midtown Manhattan park, that pushing through boredom or discomfort bring fulfillment. Not all these efforts are rewarded, but neither are any of them in vain. “So many of life’s discoveries happen when I stay that extra uncomfortable minute, past the point of restlessness and boredom,” she writes. Chapters at the Tribute in Light, Bryant Park, and the Empire State Building all recontextualize the New York City she thought she knew; trips to the Platte River in Nebraska and Magee Marsh in Ohio expand her horizons of awe in ways that only birds can. As she takes us along with her on these explorations, Taylor expresses a genuine talent for describing birds and their behaviors (the arresting elegance of a flock of Cedar Waxwings she watches comes to mind) with verve and vibrancy that shine against the backdrop of broadly quotidian prose.
Yet this sensitivity to the glittering facets of the bird world is marred by other forms of insensitivity. One revealing instance involves a campaign against House Sparrows she wages after finding that the invaders have killed a nest of baby bluebirds on her upstate property. She sets a trap meant to capture them alive, but—mentioning this with an alarming nonchalance—instead kills a native Song Sparrow. Expressing distress only about the failure of her efforts to repel her intended target, she finally calls in a hunter neighbor to destroy the male of the pair. While few birders would shed a tear for a House Sparrow that had just killed a nest of baby bluebirds, the unaddressed selectiveness of her empathy comes across as jarring.
More troubling is the ethnic dimension of some of these accounts. In describing the impact of those invasive sparrows on the native bluebirds, Taylor draws an uncomfortable parallel to the genocide of Indigenous peoples by European settlers (compared to the native bluebirds, Taylor says, the introduced birds “were bigger and stronger, kind of like guns versus a bow and arrow”).
Other metaphors veer toward shallow Orientalism, as in an allusion to a Rumi poem she misinterprets. On another occasion, she cites an “ancient Sanskrit prayer” of unspecified provenance—this wording evokes some enigmatically Eastern ritual incantation, when in fact the passage is the opening to a poem by Kalidasa, subcontinental antiquity’s best-known author. One chapter prominently features a mystifying deployment of the term “Bedouin,” a traditionally nomadic ethnic group, to describe how the disorientation of a frequently-traveling professional actor can be assuaged by ubiquitous Starbucks cafés. The proverb about home that Taylor attributes to the Bedouins, however, seems instead to be an original composition—the phrase appears nowhere else on the Internet, is not attested to descend from any nomadic folk wisdom. Perhaps the use of “Bedouin” here, in the text and as the chapter title, was a clumsy replacement for a more offensive but once-chic byword for nomadism: the slur “gypsy,” the use of which was criticized by a reviewer of a previous advance edition.
A Black parking attendant who compliments Taylor’s acting work is the only individual whose race is named, though she does offer us some amusement in the “goddamn”-laden speech of an R&B-listening Detroit native who drives her hotel shuttle on her way to the Biggest Week in American Birding festival, where she spots “diversity” among the beige crowd in one person with dyed hair and dark clothing—“a subtle goth birder”—and a few teenagers.
These sorts of observations foreground the contradictions of modern birding in meaningful and useful, though unintentional, ways. The intentions of some individuals and organizations to promote interest in birds are undermined by an unwillingness to reckon with aspects of their own privilege or ignorance that demographics underrepresented in the field would find glaring. Allegations of racism within the National Audubon Society, for one—I would not have mentioned this if Taylor did not repeatedly bring up her position on its board (in the book, she introduces herself to a stranger as an Audubon board member), a board from which three members resigned in 2023 after the organization chose to retain the Audubon name—resounded throughout the predominantly white, disproportionately wealthy birdwatching world.
While an early chapter advances a number of worthwhile observations about binoculars as an empathy-cultivating tool, it comes off as glib, even boastful, when Taylor name-drops the model of her Swarovski binoculars in the second paragraph. She writes that she started on Nikon Monarch 8x42s before graduating to a pair of Swarovskis given to her by a brand representative. By the end of the paragraph she has left the $2,800 SLC 10x42s on the roof of her car and driven away. She brushes off the loss—“lucky for someone else”—but “having been spoiled by the superior glass,” she “knew there was no turning back” and buys a Zeiss pair. While there is nothing wrong with owning expensive binoculars—just as it is no crime to have both a Hudson Valley farmhouse and a Cobble Hill apartment—I question the emphasis on material privileges inaccessible to many readers.
This preoccupation with the paraphernalia of birding extends is not limited to luxury-tier binoculars. At the festival, she recognizes it within herself and pulls away from the vendor tables to instead focus her attention on seeking birds. But though she starts out by exercising her attention skills, her interactions with nature are increasingly outlined by the resources on her phone. “Here’s an opportunity to learn in real life, from the source, not a book or app,” she writes at one point, but soon turns to eBird and iNaturalist to get her point across. Whether it is eBird’s statistical summary of a walk, the list of species detected by Merlin Bird ID, or the locations suggested by BirdsEye, her app habit undercuts her efforts to cultivate intuitive inquiry.
Both the successes and shortcomings of the book contribute to the discourse of modern birding culture. We would indeed all do well to attend more deliberately to our environments. Taylor offers compelling guidance on how this can be done by to sharpening one’s focus through the lens of birds. And her insights on observation as a veteran actor add depth to her birding adventures. Her book offers lessons even for experienced birders in the honing of attention; the emphasis on details in connecting with birds encourages us to look at our subjects to truly know them, not just identify them by rote.
Taylor’s pursuit of birds, though, is characterized from the start by a persistent escapism. Taylor finds the birds to be the most emotionally moving when she sees her own experiences reflected back to herself in them, and they bring her the most relief when they are distracting her from a stressor. Birding can be a powerful exercise in mindfulness, but mindfulness loses its power when it drifts into solipsism.