Look outside; look around you. 

I promise, no matter where you are – Portal Lake in Mount Robson or Portage and Main in Winnipeg – if you take a moment and really look – there is a bird to be seen. 

It might be an annoying pigeon, an omnipresent goose, a calling crow, a tiny sparrow, a colourful cardinal, a plodding grouse or maybe it’s a hovering hummingbird.  

But that bird? It’s your connection to nature; it’s your connection to a web so big and so complex that even ingenuity of the human mind will never be able to fully understand. 

Every day, birds are all around us. They’re so imbedded in our lives that we ignore them, forget them and take them for granted. But birds, big and small, help weave the fabric of daily life, from the services they perform to the songs they sing – ushering in a new day, a new season, even a new perspective on a bad day. 

Of course, we often appreciate seeing an owl or an eagle – maybe even a hawk. But they’re the charismatic megafauna – the grizzly bears of the sky. What about the Canadian geese flying in their V formation high above or the faithful robin tweeting its reliable tune? Why should we appreciate birds? 

For starters, they’re not just our neighbours, they’re neighbours to us all. Through migration or simple daily flight, birds traverse the neighbourhoods of the rich and poor – the north and south; the west and east. They bridge our communities, they make better all our communities, no matter our lot in life. 

The plants around you? They are likely the result of seeds deposited by a bird. They’ve helped evolve our flora which has allowed our more famed fauna to thrive; allowed us to thrive. They literally plant the seeds of biodiversity. They are on the frontlines working to bring back species from the brink. In the west, the whitebark pine is heavily endangered – even in Mount Robson. The Clark’s nutcracker is its leading conservationist; its chief planter – doing tens of billions of dollars in restoration across the tree species’ range. If the whitebark pine goes, so likely goes the grizzly bear. 

Birds – and the bees and butterflies, of course, even more so – are pollinators. With them, our flowers bloom and our crops grow and our medicines are possible. Without birds and bees and butterflies, as is the case in China, we have to invent and spend costless millions on building drones to do the work nature does for free. Seriously. That’s happening. Go look it up. 

Speaking of crops, there are no more important elements of human society than food and birds. They are to the food chain what Amazon is to the supply chain. Even the smallest of tweeters eats its share of crop destroying insects. And I’m not just talking about a few mosquitoes; I’m talking hundreds of billions of kilograms – hundreds of billions of kilograms – of insects. Each year. No chemical in the world can do what birds do for our economy – and they do it well and, if you like, they do it organically. 

Some birds are beautiful. Some aren’t, but even those – like the vulture – plays a beautiful role. Vultures – and ravens and even Canada’s national bird, the gray jay – help us with waste management. They stop disease in its tracks and remove from our landscape what would otherwise cost each community millions per year to accomplish. Quite literally, it’s a service that saves human lives and lessens the tax burden. Like each one of these birds, accomplishes what a company might charge $10,000 to achieve. Like without this bird, a well-published story in India has made clear that its loss from the landscape cost the economy billions and families tens of thousands of loved ones.  

But the value of that bird you see isn’t just in the direct action it takes; it’s their subtle acts that truly make our day. Like the oxygen we breathe. Like the nutrients that make everything thrive. Like the water filtered and made drinkable. Like the carbon stored. Birds are the engineers and transporters that makes all of that possible. Each ecosystem on each continent and within each ocean is sustained by birds. Now it’s true, all species – including us – play a role in sustaining that balance, but with more than 200 billion birds globally, spread across over 10,000 species, none play a greater role in keeping that balance than the unsung, sometimes overlooked bird. 

And it takes a place like the Robson Valley – part of the Rocky Mountain Trench, bridging east and west, and hosting incredible bird diversity as a result – to help 170 of those species thrive, whether year round or during a brief pit stop on a twice yearly journey thousands of kilometres long.  

In fact, it takes each of us to help the miracle that is the bird help us. How? In ways large and small, easy and hard. But really, all it takes is thoughtfulness and maybe a little appreciation. 

And it’s here that I should tell you that I’m actually not a bird guy. I don’t know a finch from a warbler, and I don’t particularly care to know. But I do know that if a bird song that plays each day in the background stops playing, I would be lesser for it. I also know I would immediately feel a loss even if I couldn’t figure out what was missing. Mostly though, I know without the sandhill crane migrating or the stellar jay squawking or the swallow nesting, we would lose more than song or beauty, with time, we’d lose life.  

This is why all of us – no matter if we love birds or could care less about birds – should stop, listen, look and appreciate the birds around us – our window into the incomprehensible web of nature; the very commonality of our humanity; the beautiful cogs in the machine that is our world.