February 22, 2021 When Julia Zarankin saw her first red-winged blackbird at the age of 35, she didn’t expect that it would change her life. What she never could have predicted was that she would become one of them. Not only would she come to identify proudly as a birder, but birding would ultimately lead her to find love, uncover a new language and lay down her roots. Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder tells the story of finding meaning in midlife through birds. Read an excerpt below: I had no trouble recognizing the group in the parking lot. Cargo pants tucked into socks and signature off-white multipocketed vests, which I recognized from the times I’d Googled “birdwatchers,” each of the half-dozen people huddled around their cars wore at least one item of bird-themed clothing, ranging from a subtle baseball cap with a woodpecker on it to a more boisterous sweatshirt featuring a giant red bird with black wings, so bright I wondered for a minute if the bird could be real. I looked around for the leader while I tried to make sense of their optics-talk; questions of magnification and the optical quality of Vortex versus Eagle Eye passed me by completely, but I understood enough to nod in appreciation when Lucy, a petite retired high school teacher, showed off her recently purchased high-end Swarovski binoculars. She later admitted, with a mischievous smile, that she’d bought them with money she had set aside for a sofa.