Abstract
Introduction:
Spark bird stories are a unique transformative life experience sharing the moment or moments that helped an individual develop their appreciation of birds. The Spark Bird Project gathers, shares, and studies these stories with the aim of building knowledge in order to inform the birding community’s efforts to broadly spark and sustain an appreciation of birds.
Methods:
The present manuscript summarizes preliminary findings from 560 spark bird stories collected to date as part of a large panel study of birders.
Results:
Findings indicate that spark bird experiences happen across the lifespan with many happening in childhood and in recent years. Linguistic analyses and self-ratings of spark bird experiences indicate they are highly positive and engaging sparking curiosity and interest. Common spark birds include the Northern Cardinal and Great Blue Heron though over 200 birds as well as people and media are reported as sparks.
Discussion:
These preliminary findings from ongoing research provide initial insights to help better understand who birders are and who potential birders may be – insights which can help shape how organizations engage with birders to the potential benefit of birders, the birding community, and the birds.
Introduction
A spark bird is a term used by the birding community for the bird that hooks someone into their passion for birds. Birders know and casually talk about their spark birds and even the spark birds of famous birders. Numerous books, websites, podcasts, and other media define the term spark bird and share select stories. To date, however, there is no scholarship on spark birds. While the birding community is doing a great job of understanding birds particularly through participatory community science, knowledge about birders themselves using such an approach is still an emerging field and the topic of how birders find their way to caring about birds has yet to be empirically documented. Likewise, there are no large compilations of spark bird narratives. Publicly available spark bird accounts are scattered across media such as blogs, videos, podcast episodes, and accounts in individual memoirs all of which tend to privilege the voices of birders who have attained a degree of recognition in the birding community. The Spark Bird Project (TSBP) was created to address this gap in the social science literature and the public corpus of spark bird stories by centering the experiences of the everyday birder with an aim of building knowledge in order to inform the birding community’s efforts to broadly spark and sustain an appreciation of birds.
The birding community
Birding is a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide that is experiencing a growth of interest and engagement. An estimated 37% of the U.S. population aged 16 and older - 96 million individuals - admire birds with 16% of the population (43 million people) serious enough about birding to have traveled more than a mile to observe birds (). The economic impact of the birding industry is over $279 billion in the U.S. alone. Globally, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology reports their two cornerstone birding apps - eBird and Merlin - have demonstrated remarkable growth with over 1 million eBird users and 29.9 million Merlin users at the end of 2025 (). Market research also indicates the power of birding on tourism with an estimated $70 billion market size in 2025 anticipated to grow to over $117 billion by 2033 noting particular growth in the Asian Pacific market and the most revenue generated in the United Kingdom ().
In the U.S., birders tend to be older, well-educated, and White. The U.S Fish and Wildlife report notes considerable variability, however, and diversifying birding is actively at the heart of the efforts of many bird-related advocacy groups. The report indicates that birders are also a highly invested group spending considerable time and financial resources on birding. For some, birding goes far beyond a hobby defining the careers of an estimated millions of individuals working in the birding industry from customer service at birding stores to ornithologists and naturalists in the field and in education (). The birding community is also a highly interconnected social group with list serves, meet ups, and organizations from the local to global level providing opportunities for engagement from interpersonal connection to volunteering to support bird conservation efforts. While human-related causes are at the forefront of challenges to birds globally, humans are also at the heart of bird conservation efforts (). In turn, a growing literature points to the tremendous psychological benefit to the appreciation of birds ().
Narrative identity as a resource for understanding birding
These points signal the value of gaining a deeper understanding of how birders come to their appreciation of birds. Personality science, particularly the field of narrative identity research, has the potential to do so by leveraging the centrality of spark bird stories to the birding community in general and individual identity as a birder in particular. Narrative identity researchers commonly ask for and examine themes in identity-defining memories such as peak experiences, early memories, turning point memories, or self-defining memories (). Narrative science also asks about specific, contextualized stories such as coming out stories (), the stories of recovering alcoholics’ last drink (), ethnic identity (), and stories of personality change () as well as shared experiences such as the impact of 9/11 () and COVID-19 () on identity. In telling such identity-defining stories, individuals share themselves.
By investigating self-defining transformative spark bird experiences, TSBP leverages the existing shared narratives that live at the heart of the birding community. In doing so, it learns from and gives voice to the transformative experiences of hundreds of everyday birders. Data collection and sharing of spark bird stories will continue indefinitely. However, with almost 600 stories shared to date, it is important to begin to share what these stories hold. As such, this manuscript reports preliminary findings of preregistered, exploratory research from the project including the age at which spark bird experiences happen, linguistic analysis of spark bird stories, subjective emotional ratings of spark bird experiences, and most common spark birds. In doing so, this manuscript gives initial insights into what can be learned from the stories in the project, raises awareness for the open data as a resource for others interested in investigating trends and variability in spark bird experiences, and identifies next steps for the project.
Materials and methods
Data include 560 stories from 544 individuals who shared one or more1 spark bird stories and consented to participate in the research study to date. Participants range in age from 9 to 90 with an average age of 44.91 (SD = 18.22) and primarily identify as White (88.63%), Female (56.63%)2, well-educated (34.14% have at least a college degree and 40.48% hold a graduate/advanced degree), United States residents (88.51%) who exclusively speak English at home (95.78%).3 Participants under the age of 18 assented to the project and participated with a guardian’s consent.
Data collection and storage for TSBP occurs via the REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) electronic data capture tools hosted at Canisius University. REDCap is a secure, web-based application designed to support data capture for research studies, providing 1) an intuitive interface for validated data entry; 2) audit trails for tracking data manipulation and export procedures; 3) automated export procedures for seamless data downloads to common statistical packages; and 4) procedures for importing data from external sources (). Data are accessed via application programming interface (API) and deidentified data, excluding spark bird stories where the participant asked us not to publicly share their story and raw open-ended demographic responses, are available at https://osf.io/wrv27/.4
There are no exclusion criteria for participation in TSBP and other ways of completing the survey including paper forms and interviews are available to all participants on request. REDCap allows participants to utilize text-to-speech capabilities and adjust the font size to their preference though translation to other languages is not available at this point. Individuals were recruited from a variety of participatory community science outreach means including newsletters, listservs, public programs, tabling at bird festivals, social media posts, community partner bird challenges, media coverage of TSBP, contributing their stories to The Spark Bird Podcast, and word-of-mouth. Participants who shared their email address were entered in a drawing to donate $100 to the bird-related organization of their choice. Special incentives at the end of 2025 and beginning of 2026 included having artists compose a sketch of randomly selected spark birds stories and a drawing to receive bird-friendly coffee, a subscription to BWD magazine, and a gift card to FeatherFriendly. Canisius University’s Institutional Review Board approved all data collection efforts (protocol 2021-22 #46).
Data reported here are from a small subset of the questionnaires included in TSBP survey which includes other open-ended questions; measures of birding engagement including time, financial, and psychological investment; and measures of birding behavior alongside measures of psychological well-being, personality, and health. The full REDCap data dictionary and a pdf of the complete survey are available at https://osf.io/wrv27/. These additional measures will be made publicly available on OSF once 1000 individuals have participated in TSBP as will annual longitudinal follow up data. The focus of this preliminary report, however, is just on the entry-point spark bird prompt and preliminary preregistered, exploratory data analyses.
The spark bird open-ended prompt was adapted from the self-defining memory () and life story interview key memory () prompts and informed by participatory feedback to read:
“Your spark bird story is the story of the bird/book/person/moment/experience that got you hooked on birding. Your spark bird memory likely stands out to you as a specific event(s) or incident(s) that occurred at a particular time and place that you have thought about often. It may stand out to you for a particular reason - perhaps it was especially good, particularly vivid, important, or memorable, or occurred during a challenging time in your life. It is likely a memory that you remember clearly and that still feels important to you even as you think about it.
Use the space below to share your spark bird story. Please be elaborate in your telling of this experience. But also don’t feel like you have to answer each of these questions or in this order - they are just ideas to get you started! What was your spark bird? Did you see it in person or learn about it in a field guide, video, podcast, work of art, lecture, etc.? What happened? Where were you? What was the setting like? How did you come to be there? Were you alone or with others? If you were with others, who was with you and what, if any, was their role in your experience? What were you thinking and feeling in the moment? Why do you think this particular experience was a spark bird moment for you? What does it say about you, your connection to others, and/or your understanding of the world?
Tell your story in your voice as you might to a friend while you are driving back from a morning of birding or waiting for spring.”
This open-ended prompt is followed by a link to TSBP story repository along with notes about what other open-ended responses they will have the opportunity to address later in the survey, the option of alternate modalities of submission from submitting a recording to completing a paper form, and that not every story is necessarily a single point in time. After sharing their spark bird story, participants are asked to provide their age at the time of the memory and how many years ago the memory occurred. Additionally, in accordance with self-defining memory research (), participants are asked to evaluate their memory on the following adjectives using a scale of 0 (not at all) to 6 (extremely): happy, sad, angry, fearful, surprised, ashamed, disgusted, guilty, interested, embarrassed, contemptful, proud, vivid, important. Participants are also provided the opportunity to share additional spark bird experiences and rate their emotional valence on the same rating scale.
Most analyses were conducted in R version 4.3.1 (). R code and R Markdown output for this manuscript are available at https://osf.io/wrv27/. The exception to this was the linguistic analysis which was conducted using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC-22; ) software, a text analysis tool commonly used by social-personality psychologists to generate proportion counts of psychologically relevant words. Output from LIWC analyses is available at https://osf.io/wrv27/.
Results
Individuals self-reported being 25.33 years of age on average at the time of their spark bird experience (SD = 15.78). It is important to note that self-reported ages ranged widely from 0–77 with one participant noting “I was born loving birds, I can’t remember a time I did not love birds.” and another “I grew up with birds. My parents were birders and banders and I didn’t have much choice: We were all about birds! As such I really didn’t/don’t have a spark bird. I love them all. They have always been a major part of my life.”. Figure 1 provides an age frequency distribution of spark bird experiences. The modal ages of spark bird experiences was 8 (frequency = 28).
Figure 1
On average, spark bird experiences occurred 20.57 years ago (SD = 19.57); however, again there was a great deal of variability in the sample with experiences happening as recently as 0 years and as long ago as 89 years. The modal recency is 2 years (frequency = 41). Figure 2 illustrates this finding.
Figure 2
Linguistic analysis indicates that spark bird stories range in length from 15 to 1421 words with an average length of 265.65 words (SD = 203.10). The ten most frequently used words (excluding the words bird, birds, birding, and spark) are time, see, day, years/year, started, life, nature, remember, and species. Each of these words occurs in at least 25% of spark bird stories. Figure 3 visualizes this with a word cloud and the full list is available on OSF.
Figure 3
Norm comparisons show that, relative to the broad corpus of texts that serves as the basis for LIWC norms (), spark bird stories are rich in cognitive and perceptual words, particularly visual, attention, spatial, auditory, and motion words. There is also a temporal component to spark bird stories with past-focused, memory, and time words well-represented. Spark bird stories score highly on authenticity metrics and express a high degree of curiosity. Family, home, and affiliative words are also significantly represented in spark bird stories as are words that represent analytic thinking, positive tone, and cognitive insight. Spark bird stories were relatively less negative compared to norms and had fewer swear words as well as words associated with the future, present, politics, power, money, clout, physical health, work, religion, sex, achievement, morality, wants, and substance use. Please see OSF for the complete, lengthy table of these results.
As shown in Figure 4, participant ratings of the emotionality of spark bird experiences echo the positive tone in the linguistic analysis indicating spark bird experiences are largely positive in nature though some also deal with negative emotions.
Figure 4
Finally, to address one of the most common questions asked by the public regarding spark birds, the most common spark birds are the Northern Cardinal (n = 18) and the Great Blue Heron (n = 16) with Red-winged Blackbird (n = 14), Scarlet Tanager (n = 11), and Northern Flicker (n = 11) following. Importantly, there are over 200 bird species featured in spark bird stories ranging from the American Bittern to Yellow-rumped Warblers. It is also important to note that 87 participants (14.97%) reported non-bird sparks. Spark people are particularly common (n = 48) and spark books (n = 9), feeders (n = 5), games (n = 5), and movies (n = 3) are represented in these stories. A list of the most common spark birds can be found at www.spark-bird.org/research.
Discussion
The current findings from stories shared with TSBP to date provide important insights into the timing and quality of the transformative life experience of discovering a love of birds.
The preliminary findings from TSBP highlight the particular importance of regularly providing opportunities for spark bird experiences in childhood. However, it is important to have some caution in interpreting the density of childhood spark bird experiences reported to date. The archetypal spark bird story is that of Roger Tory Peterson, the creator of the modern field guide, who says, “As we entered a wood lot on the crest of the hill near the reservoir, I spotted a bundle of brown feathers clinging to the trunk of a tree. It was a flicker. I thought it was dead. Gingerly, I touched it on the back. Instantly, this inert thing jerked its head around, looked at me with wild eyes, then exploded in a flash of golden wings and fled into the woods. Ever since, birds have seemed to me the most vivid expression of life.” (). Peterson was 11 at the time of this experience. Other notable figures in the birding world also have childhood experiences. This does not mean it is necessarily the norm. It may instead mean that birders may perceive childhood sparks as the norm and be more likely to report childhood spark moments. Birders who came to birding later in life sometimes express uncertainty that their story “counts” and are hesitant to share their spark bird story.
Likewise, through conversations with the public, it is clear that people who do not have a specific single spark bird moment may not feel that their story is appropriate to share. Furthermore, individuals who do not feel that their interest in birds warrants the identity of “birder” also feel cautious about sharing their experiences. Ongoing public communication and sharing of spark bird stories broadly can help to dispel these preconceptions. Indeed, individuals who attend public spark bird programs report that learning about TSBP and taking time to reflect on their birding experiences helped them realize they do have a spark bird experience that they simply had not thought of in such terms before.
It is also important to note that spark bird experiences do not just occur in childhood and instead can and do happen across the lifespan. This finding points to the need for community birding organizations to provide avenues for birders of all ages and potentially affinity groups for birders of specific age groups to connect with their peers realizing the value of sharing not just sightings but the emotional power of their experiences with others (). At the same time, this finding points to the intergenerationality of birding and stories shared with the project clearly highlight the importance of intergenerationality in creating spark bird experiences.
Participants who have contributed their stories to TSBP so far tend to be fairly recent converts to birding. One particularly notable spark story shared an encounter the day before with a Kirtland’s Warbler saying of the experience, “it was like winning a lottery in a currency I didn’t understand”! This is not surprising given the exponential growth in interest in birding in recent years (; ). From greater opportunities to experience birds during the pandemic to recent technological advancements, new birders are everywhere. It is important that long-time birders be welcoming to these new people in their communities and ensure that their spark is sustained in the years to come. Likewise, the longitudinal component of TSBP will undertake the important work of understanding how birding evolves for these new birders.
Linguistic analysis shows that spark bird stories are cognitively and perceptually complex, sharing detailed retrospective accounts of these transformative moments that set them apart from norm data. Compared to these norms, spark bird stories score highly on authenticity metrics and express a high degree of curiosity. Family, home, and affiliative words are also significantly represented in spark bird stories capturing the deeply interpersonal nature of these stories.
The emotional content both in linguistic analysis and self-ratings of spark bird stories speaks to the positive nature of these moments. People are happy and interested in these vivid and personally important stories. There is often surprise in the unexpected discovery of wonder in the behavior of birds. Moments of mastery in successfully identifying a bird by sound or in a field guide point are captured in feelings of pride. At the same time, some spark bird stories convey negative emotions. These stories share the importance of birds to moments of grief or recovery from illness.
The most common spark birds reported to TSBP to date are relatively common, visually interesting birds that exhibit bold colors and/or behaviors including intriguing vocalizations. They are also primarily North American birds reflecting the heavily U.S.-based current sample. Recruitment efforts beyond this region are ongoing. Likewise, intentional efforts to thoughtfully engage a more racially and ethnically diverse audience are underway from individual outreach to non-English language translations. Future global research will provide insights from the extent to which the spark bird concept is universal to cultural variability in the timing and content of spark bird experiences. For example, it may be that other geographic regions lack the concept of spark birds but can still tell coherent, meaningful narratives of the concept. Indeed, a recent conversation at the Global BirdFair in the UK suggests this may be the case ().
More in depth content analysis of spark bird stories is also ongoing to systematically assess themes of interpersonal connections, growth, connection to nature, mastery, curiosity, coping, bird behaviors that pique interest, the inspiration of creative expression in photography and other forms of art, and the importance of the birding community and access to resources such as field guides and optics as well as bird feeders and travel. Ongoing analyses are also taking a top-down approach coding for themes commonly studied in other identity-defining, transformative life experiences such as emotional tone, agency, communion, coherence, and redemption sequences (). Over time, these will be paired with other individual difference variables such as engagement in birding, variability in birding behaviors, personality traits, and wellness. Data from TSBP will be openly available to social scientists interested in questions that can be addressed such as “that different personality variables are implicated in the choice to bird with others versus alone” (, p. 13).
Conclusion
The findings reported in this manuscript are preliminary but point to the lifelong power of birds to spark curiosity and wonder in human lives. The sharing of spark bird experiences affords an opportunity to ask other important questions about birding from benefits to barriers. In doing so, TSBP aims to help better understand who birders are and who potential birders may be – insights which can help shape how organizations engage with birders to the potential benefit of birders, the birding community, and the birds. TSBP also helps birders better understand each other as it aims to share these stories with the public via TSBP website, podcast, and community outreach events. Please take a moment to visit www.spark-bird.org to share your story, read the stories shared so far, and learn more about the project. Collaborators are always welcome!
Statements
Data availability statement
The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found in the article/Supplementary Material.
Ethics statement
The studies involving humans were approved by Canisius University Institutional Review Board. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation in this study was provided by participants or, for participants under the age of 18, by the participants' legal guardian.
Author contributions
JL: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
Funding
The author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. This work was supported in part by a seed grant from the American Bird Conservancy and a scholar-in-residence role with the Roger Tory Peterson Institute.
Acknowledgments
As with so many stories in The Spark Bird Project, my spark bird story is not a bird, it is three people and particular acknowledgment and appreciation to my kiddos Sam (now 16) and Maisie (now 13) and my dear friend Dr. Sara Morris. While this manuscript is a single author manuscript, data were collected in collaboration with community partners around the region and survey development was informed by participatory feedback from participants and community partners, notably Hog Island Audubon Camp, Buffalo Audubon Society, Birdability, Audubon Magazine, BWD Magazine, NYS DEC, Southeast Arizona Birding Festival, and the Urban Birding Festival. Particular thanks to the Roger Tory Peterson Institute for their continued financial support of The Spark Bird Project and to research assistants Genevieve Fontana, Kayla Gajewski, Kara Hatalsky, Allie Meisner, and Farra Lie for their support of the project. Most of all, thank you to the participants who have shared their spark experiences and the birds (and people)! who made those moments of wonder possible.
Conflict of interest
The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Generative AI statement
The author(s) declared that generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.
Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Supplementary material
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbirs.2026.1870756/full#supplementary-material
Footnotes
1.^Some participants have more than one spark bird experience and the survey design allows them to share additional spark bird stories.
2.^Gender identity is captured using an open-ended response space and then scored with R scripts to allow participants to fully express their gender identity. As these responses contain unique, personal, and identifiable answers, the scoring is masked in the code available on OSF but a link to template code is provided for interested researchers to use in their own work. Notably, 10.29% of the sample identified as non-binary, agender, gender queer, or identified using additional terms beyond traditional binary gender labels. All transgender individuals were coded according to their reported gender identity. The Spark Bird Project does not collect data on sex assigned at birth.
3.^N.B. Demographic data are missing for 152 of participants who chose not to share this information. This is largely due to all measures beyond the spark bird story being optional additional components of the survey during initial data collection. Once participants were immediately sent to demographic questions, response rates increased. Missing data will be collected in longitudinal follow up.
4.^The majority of spark bird stories are available publicly at https://www.spark-bird.org/stories; however, not all individuals who asked to have their story shared publicly also consented to participate in the research component of the project and vice versa. Because of this, we ask researchers not to base analyses on the stories posted on The Spark Bird Project website. The stories used in the present manuscript that are not posted on the website or OSF space because of requested privacy from participants are available on request to interested researchers.
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Summary
Keywords
birding, developmental psychology, emotions, narrative identity, spark birds
Citation
Lodi-Smith J (2026) Preliminary findings from The Spark Bird Project: learning about timing, emotions, and sparks through contextual self-defining narratives. Front. Bird Sci. 5:1870756. doi: 10.3389/fbirs.2026.1870756
Received
01 May 2026
Revised
29 July 2026
Accepted
03 August 2026
Published
15 September 2026
Volume
5 - 2026
Edited by
Bruktawit Abdu Mahamued, Kotebe University of Education, Ethiopia
Reviewed by
Yahkat Barshep, A.P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute, Nigeria
Jean Hugé, Open University of the Netherlands, Netherlands
Updates
Copyright
© 2026 Lodi-Smith.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Jenn Lodi-Smith, lodismij@canisius.edu
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.