Sometimes all you need is to spend time in the great outdoors, where you soak up the sunshine, breathe fresh air, and commune with wildlife. Getting out for a walk in your local park or even birding alone or with your family can have a powerful impact on your brain.
Birding by itself teaches us patience and gently coaxes us to be calm. It’s a great opportunity to just zone out or have a little reflection and think calmly. Our guest for today will definitely agree on that matter. According to Ryan Dibala of Birding Man Adventures, birding is a great way for people to get outdoors and connect with nature.
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Birding with Benefits: How Nature Improves Your Well Being with Ryan Dibala
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I’d like to switch gears with you a little bit and I’d like to talk to you about birding. Now, this is a topic that we have yet to discuss on this particular podcast because it’s a type of experience that people either know a lot about or know very little about. Some people get really, really into birding and some people just don’t know much about it. But, in life, there’s going to be a lot of experiences like that and it’s good to be exposed to the large depth of experiences that there are out there. According to my guest today, Ryan Dibala of Birding Man Adventures, birding is a great way for people to get outdoors and connect into nature.
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Ryan, welcome to the program.
Pleasure to be here, Steve. Thanks for having me.
Oh, thank you so much. And, Ryan, tell me about your experience with birding. What made birding be the thing that you wanted to, first of all, do a lot of yourself and also bring to others?
Right after college, I was working as a biologist on Santa Catalina Island and we were actually restoring bald eagles to the national park after a massive decline in numbers due to DDT, which I’m sure many people are familiar with DDT and what it did as it worked its way up the food chain, essentially with the raptors, like bald eagles, it depleted their egg shells of calcium so the nesting eagles would crush the eggs and then that would prevent successful recruitment ultimately. So we were actually involved in the direct manipulations of eggs and chicks on the island’s eagles’ nests so, of course, I was around other birders, I had my first pair of binoculars and a spotting scope and I was able to tune into some of the smaller birds on the island. That particular island has several different endemics that only are there, like many islands have, they have species that only can be found on those islands so I think I saw, it was a Hutton’s Vireo, a Catalina Hutton’s Vireo, and that might have been my gateway bird, I guess you could call it.
A gateway bird, never heard it described that way before.
So ever since that moment, I’ve really been paying attention to the birds around me. I found that it really slows me down, it helps me focus. We have these weapons of mass distraction in our pockets and we’re always on them, these cell phones that distract us from the world and prevent us from tuning into what’s in front of our eyes at the present moment. And so, as a result, we’ve seen a lot more ADD and NDD, nature deficit disorder, and realizing that going out into nature and slowing down and looking at the world as it is right around me, that’s helped center me and relieve a lot of anxiety that has come about from the world that we live in with so much technology so that’s one of many reasons that I continue to bird today. I can certainly go into more of the reasons why I think it’s an amazing pursuit and something that more people should do.
What does birding entail? Like if, let’s say, these podcasts usually come out on Tuesdays and if you’re listening in the middle of the week and someone says, “Alright, this sounds really interesting. I wanna go birding on Saturday,” what is that day going to look like?
So it can look like a million different things. It can be you sitting with a coffee in your backyard and looking at your bird feeder and birding for 10 minutes. That’s an act of birding where you’re looking at what comes to your feeder and you can just take it in leisurely and make notes. Maybe you already know what you’re seeing because you’ve seen it for the last however many years you’ve been looking at your feeder or maybe you don’t so maybe it has you picking up a field guide, flipping through the pages, playing this little match game trying to figure out what exactly did I just see. So it can be 10 minutes in your backyard looking at your feeder or it can be 24-hour birdathon. Actually, this week, my wife, Angie, and I and a couple of friends of ours are going to head out for a “24-hour” period and I’m going to put those 24 hours in quotation marks because it’s probably not going to be quite 24 hours.
Yeah, it’s a long time to stay up in one without sleeping but some people do it.
I know, yeah. So it’s essentially this idea of going out and trying to find as many birds as you can in 24 hours. You go out during the day, you go out during the morning, you take breaks, you probably go out at night, maybe do some owling and, throughout the day, you’re just trying to make that list as big as you can so you’re going to visit a variety of different habitats, you’re going to maximize the environments that you’re in so you can see more birds and you generally try to line that day up with optimal weather patterns so you want to get a day where the birds are migrating or you can also get a day where if you’re looking at the weather patterns, if you’re lucky, you can line up with what we call a fallout where you have all these birds that are exhausted after migrating for however long, generally over large geographic areas, they could be oceans, for example, the Gulf of Mexico is a great example where they come on to the coast of Mississippi or Louisiana and they just fall out because they’re so exhausted and then they spend time in this area. So, you think about the weather patterns, what they’re doing, where you’re going, maybe you’re going to a place where fallouts are more regular, and then you can maximize the number of birds that you see that way. So, depending on how intense you want to get about it, it can be this really intricate thing where you’re looking at the weather patterns, you’re looking at what’s been seen previously or within the previous 24 hours so that you know what you should be looking for at a particular place at a particular time.
So, a couple questions. First on a goofier note, so a few weeks ago, I was walking my dog in City Park, which is a park a little bit east of downtown Denver and there was a bunch of birds sitting in that big pond there and my dog looked at them and then started running after them. Does this mean that my dog qualifies as a birder?
I’d say so. I’d say so. Your dog is generally interested in the birds, but probably going to want to eat those birds when it gets to them.
Yeah, that seems a little bit off the actual purpose. My other question is that, given that birding is about slowing down and spending some time in nature, if you do one of these birdathons where you’re trying to see as many species of bird in one day, does that have the potential to detract from the original mission to slow down?
Absolutely. I think that if you have the end all goal in mind of seeing as many species as you possibly can, you start to get away from what really makes birding special, and some of you may have seen the movie The Big Year with Steve Martin, Jack Black, I think Owen Wilson was in that movie as well, but it tells the story of these individuals that are doing a big year. They’re trying to find as many species of birds in one year as they possibly can. This is one of the pursuits of avid birders. And it gets cutthroat just like anything else, any other hobby can get cutthroat where people are doing whatever it is they can to get the job done and pushing anybody away or just forgetting about what it means to be a good person.
My wife, Angie, and I, if we’re going to go out for a hike, Angie always has to specify, “Ry, are we gonna go birding or we’re gonna go hiking?” because there’s a difference. So if we’re hiking, that means we have a destination. We want to get to that destination and get back. If we’re going birding, there is no destination. It’s always an adventure, it’s always a surprise. We could find ourselves in a place that we never imagined going to. Just the other day I was at a place called Lowell Ponds, it’s fairly close to where I am, it’s in sort of the Northern Denver Metro area, and I would have never gone to this spot if it wasn’t for birding, but I was there and I was exploring new terrain and I saw a lot of great birds. Our approach is we’re going to visit four different places. In each of those spots, we’ll probably stay for two hours. So you can call us weaklings, if you want, because we’re definitely not going to be anywhere close to 24 hours but what we’re going to do is since it’s going to be quality time, not necessarily the quantity of time and we’re going to go out there and we’re just going to basically be patient. We’re going to stand, we’re going to look, we’re going to watch and see what comes to us. And it’s just fun. We actually do this as a fundraiser for Denver Audubon, which is an organization that we feel very passionate about. We both got our Master Naturalist certifications through Denver Audubon and so we’ve been volunteering with them and leading bird walks and just trying to get engaged and trying to get other people engaged. And one of the beautiful things about birding is the community and we’ve met a lot of amazing people through Denver Audubon. So they have this annual birdathon that they do.
First of all, just for the audience, what is Denver Audubon? What’s their mission?
It doesn’t have anything to do with the highway system.
Yeah, I bet there’s some people who might have been thinking about the German highway system, but Denver Audubon, what’s the mission of the organization?
The mission of the organization is to conserve birds through education, research, and conservation actions. It’s in Littleton. It’s actually in Chatfield State Park. They have a nature center that’s there, so in the southwestern part of the Denver Metro area, and they regularly have activities that they organize. They have nature walks the first week of the month, they organize these walk the wetlands walk. They get people together who are actually planting the species in their perennial garden. And they also have children’s programs. They have the Master Naturalist program so they have certification and training programs that you can sign up for that directly support the organization through the funds that are generated. So, it’s a wonderful organization. There are Audubon chapters throughout the state of Colorado and throughout every state in the United States so we’re all doing work that supports the same mission, it’s just Denver Audubon is located closest to us and so we’ve chosen them to spend more time with and to work more closely with them. In essence, what I’m doing with Birding Man Adventures is I’m ultimately looking to support local organizations and charity organizations that ultimately are conserving bird populations and also conserving the land that they need and the land that will protect them.
So how did Birding Man Adventures initially come about? Like you have this island experience, and forgive me, I’m forgetting the name of the island where you discovered your gateway bird and you discovered that you loved it. What brought you to wanting to start Birding Man experiences and wanting to do it for the Audubon Society?
So my passion in life is connecting with people through nature and having a positive influence on someone’s overall environmental consciousness. Click To Tweet
hat is where I feel most rewarded if I can have an interaction with someone that ultimately ends up in us both feeling more empowered to protect our planet. There’s a difference between someone who likes to go to a national park and see wildlife and then someone who cares deeply about acting in their best interests for all living things.
Yeah, we’ve seen the other example, people pulling out tripods three feet from a grizzly bear and stuff like that.
Yeah. We call those tourons. There’s actually a page on Instagram that I follow called Tourons of Yellowstone and it just shows people in their worst light. We’re loving our national parks to death and that does a good job of showing how we’re doing that, unfortunately.
I read about that. How with the number of visitors there, you might as well have people living there sometimes.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s gotten insane, which can lead us down a whole rabbit hole of conversation, but a lot of the parks are implementing permit systems now, which I’m in Rocky Mountain National Park a lot with my work and —
Yeah, they have a reservation system now.
They have a reservation system, exactly, and even in their backcountry permits, they now have a limited number of backcountry permits. They do hold walk-in permits so you can always go in and get a walk-in permit but, online, there’s a limited number of permits.
We’re all happy that people have discovered this love of national parks and this love of observing nature but wishing that there was a more effective way to keep it open and keep it preserved. And so you were talking about this line of consciousness in the connections that you’re building.
And I’m really not interested in just attracting experienced birders, I’m actually just as interested or even more interested in attracting people who have never birded a day in their life, don’t know a thing about it, and getting people into nature that don’t necessarily get there. One of the other things I do on my tours is I lead camping trips so I provide all the gear for camping so it might just be an overnight trip out of the city where you’ve never been camping before or maybe you have been camping, you just don’t have the gear and you don’t want to think about the logistics of cooking and the food and everything that you need. So, just getting people out into nature who want to be there or who have never been there that are interested in it and then gradually introducing them to some of these things, like birds. Of course, mammals also people are always excited to see. In Rocky, I call the big five mammals, there’s the —
Oh, yeah, the moose, the elk…
Yeah, the mule deer, the elk, the moose, the bighorn sheep, the black bears, if you’re lucky. So people love to see those and when it comes to birds, they just say, “Oh, that’s just a little brown jobbie. Who cares about that thing?” but the really cool thing about the birds is that you start to ask more questions, you start to look at the phenology or sort of the seasonal changes of the plants that these birds are using and we look at how those change and how they change from year to year. When you start going out and asking the questions that a naturalist asks, you just become so embedded in the natural world in a way that, to me, it’s atomic. It’s this healer, just being in the world asking questions and seeing how it’s changing around us and seeing how every living thing is interacting. You just open up the next level and the next level and the next level and before you know it, you’re looking at tiny insects and you’re curious about things that you never would even stop to pay attention to.
I know my first thought has always been like, “Okay, they’re just birds, this one’s red, this one’s blue, I guess it’s kinda cool,” until you start looking more at some of the details, more at some of the specifics, and I’m guessing that’s similar for a lot of other people as well.
Absolutely. You can get as deep into the weeds as you want, but just starting to pay attention and something as simple as getting a pair of binoculars and learning how to use a pair of binoculars is an amazing addition to your life. It changed my life when I got my first pair of binoculars.
Yeah, I can imagine.
Just like a microbiologist would probably tell you, “Wow, ever since I got that microscope, life hasn’t been the same.”
On your tours, you tend to go to some sort of habitat area, open field, something like that, and spend a couple hours in one place, being patient, waiting for the birds, observing the birds. Does that have a transformation on, say, the rest of someone’s life and some other areas where even if you’re in the city and you’re, say, walking around, you’re more likely to notice the specific bricks on the building over there or the specific facial expression or group dynamics in some group of people across the street and some of the things that we encounter in our urban lives for those of us that live in large metropolitan areas or cities?
I would like to think so.
There’s certainly this wonderful cognitive component behind it where, when you start birding and you start identifying species, it really helps to generate this library of resources in your own mind so you’re remembering field marks or a variety of field marks that are unique to a particular species of bird, you start with sort of the size and the shape of the bird and you can immediately start to categorize the bird into a family of birds and then, from there, you might have two birds, two species of birds that are remarkably similar and it might only be the perspective of the bill that is the main thing that you use to differentiate the two so you’re really honing in on these finite details. And there’s even more than just that. It’s the experience in the field. The longer you spend in the field looking at these things, you really start to feel them out and get this intuition of the gestalt of the actual bird. So, yes, I think all these things are improved the more time you spend birding. Certainly as we age and as we have cognitive decline, birding is a wonderful thing to keep your brain active. Birding by ear is a wonderful way to learn a new language. I actually spend time listening to bird calls and songs just so I can walk out in the woods and know what’s singing around me because that’s what’s going to tune me in to where the bird is and what birds to look for in the first place.
You could be woken up by some sort of sound and easily just, based on your knowledge, know, “Ah, that damn sparrow.” You know exactly what kind of bird it was that woke you up and it just really informs what obscenity you’re going to yell when you’re unexpectedly woken up at an hour of the morning that is too early or something like that.
If I could only kill that mockingbird right now.
So the other thing I’m wondering is, you talked about this cognitive decline with age and how learning some of the stuff about birds can help reduce that cognitive decline, help keep your brain sharp. What do you think is the worst thing someone could do for cognitive decline?
Not moving, I’d say is number one. Not moving.
Movement is medicine and so being sedentary. Click To Tweet
Also, I think we spend way too much time passively learning instead of actively learning and so sitting there and watching the boob tube all night long, having things funneled to us is in no way an active pursuit in developing our brain and so I think that if you can minimize the time that you spend behind the screen watching television, I think if you actively continue to read and exercise and pursue a practice, whether it’s meditation or whether it’s art or whether it’s birding, those are really great, great ways to keep your mind active. But I’d say the very worst thing you could do is just to sit around and not move.
That makes sense, for sure, and I’m sure a lot of people do that. I have tons of ideas and a constant struggle of trying to reduce this passive content consumption, where the algorithm is determining what you’re watching and sometimes — well, I mean, the algorithm is not your friend. If you’re going on to YouTube and say, “I’m really interested in…” I’m just going to pick something random, learning a little bit more about medieval history, and you type that into the search and you find a really informative video, that’s something completely different than just scroll and whatever pops up, just let it keep playing, for sure. The one other thing I want to cover is that, in your life, you’ve managed to set up a little bit of a different setup from the average person, but you have a couple of different ventures that all funnel into the same general idea of building connection but takes you to a variety of different places.
Absolutely. The only way I have really been able to pursue starting my own business is because I have had these other work opportunities on the side. So, actually, part time, I work doing sales and business development for a company called Learn from Travel. We’re actually a third party provider for study abroad programs. I’ve been able to do a lot of remote work. Also, I’ve been able to travel internationally with that job. Actually, in June, I’m headed to Ecuador to meet with some faculty members that are scouting for their trips and ensuring that the safety and security situation is all set before they bring students to those countries. So that’s been a wonderful opportunity to continue using my Spanish. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador and learned Spanish and that’s also something that I offer on my tours is Spanish fluency and wanting to get more Latinos and Spanish-speaking people engaged in the outdoors and connected to the outdoors through birding. And then I also guide. I’ve been guiding for a while too for another company but starting my own company is really a way that I can create more leverage to do the things I want to do with my money. And when you’re working for somebody else, you don’t necessarily have that capacity. So, for me, it’s really important that I can set my situation up in a way where I know that I’m going to have a certain amount of money left over to support the causes that I truly believe in.
And that’s the trade off with entrepreneurship in general, because starting something on your own is always going to take a little bit more effort, there’s always going to be a little bit more uncertainty going on, like you’re ultimately responsible for how many people show up and how to handle any other fire that needs to be put out. The buck stops with you. But the trade off, of course, is that autonomy, being able to make those decisions and build what you want to build, sometimes when and where you want to build them as opposed to having someone else dictate that for you. And so how has that journey been for you with these two other part-time endeavors as well as your own company? How much of that autonomy do you have right now?
Yeah, so that’s often tricky to balance the work needs and the responsibilities of different jobs, but I feel pretty lucky because I have the time where I can schedule things out and I don’t overcommit to any one of those things, it’s not like all those jobs are full-time jobs, and I never make promises that I can’t keep and so I think that that has so far worked itself out pretty well. I think once my business starts to get more busy, I’ll probably have to dial back some of those other things that I’m working on. And I hope that that’s the case, where I can actually fully engage in what I’m most passionate about. I was actually particularly galvanized by a 2019 study in the journal Science which documented the loss of close to 3 billion birds in North America since 1970 so actually it’s known as the 3 Billion Birds study and scientists used data from the Breeding Bird Atlas and they actually reported that North American bird populations have dropped by almost 30 percent since 1970 so we’ve lost one in four birds in just 50 years. And we’re not just talking about rare birds, we’re talking about common backyard birds like dark-eyed juncos that a lot of us are used to seeing under our feeders every day so this indicates a general shift in our ecosystem’s ability to support basic bird life. And so, for me, that’s like, wow, how can we let this happen in front of our eyes? And why is this happening? And you start to look at what are the causes of this decline and habitat loss is definitely the number one culprit, deforestation, agriculture, wetlands degradation. And so there are a number of things that we can do to sort of offset that. I think one of the biggest things anybody can do is restore habitats that have been degraded or just keep habitats that are still in their pristine condition as pristine as possible. And I can do that by supporting organizations that buy and protect land and try to restore land that’s already been degraded and that’s ultimately what I’m aiming to do with Birding Man Adventures is I’ve committed to donating 5 percent of my proceeds to charity organizations that purchase land and restore land so things like the Nature Conservancy or the American Bird Conservancy, Rainforest Trust, Denver Audubon. Denver Audubon doesn’t do that exactly but they’re more on the education side, where we can inspire more people to actually be doing these types of things.
If I can do that with my money, if I can help to protect land, at the end of the day, I’m going to be really content. Click To Tweet
You might be wondering what are the things that we can do in response to this massive decline of birds and there are a number of things that we can do. Obviously, there are things like buying coffee that’s good for birds, like shade-grown coffee or —
Coffee? So coffee can be bad for birds? I’m just…I never would have thought about that when purchasing coffee for some reason. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind.
Well, absolutely. If you’re buying conventional sun-grown coffee, that coffee has been planted on deforested land so, instead, if you’re looking for a label that says shade-grown, which is incredibly hard to find, most major grocery stores aren’t carrying shade-grown coffee anymore. Starbucks was carrying it for a while, I don’t know why they’re not. I know it’s more expensive to produce it and it’s more expensive to actually buy it, which makes sense, it’s sort of this added value because you are incentivizing people to keep shade trees and grow their coffee under the shade and those trees are vital for migratory birds that move through those areas.
Shade-grown coffee is what someone should be looking for?
Shade-grown coffee. Trader Joe’s carries an Ethiopian shade-grown coffee, that’s typically where I’ll get it, but also you can find it online. Birds & Beans is a good option. Smithsonian carries a line of bird-friendly coffee. So that’s one way. You can eat less beef or eat grass-fed beef that’s been sustainably raised. Of course, the livestock industry uses a lot of water and wetlands are drying out so water birds are losing habitat. So, these are a few things that we can do, but right at home in our backyard, we can focus on planting the right combination species. This is something that anybody can do. Doug Tallamy, he’s an ecologist, he actually just wrote a really great book, it’s called Nature’s Best Hope and the idea is just planting as much as you can in your backyard of your garden with native species. We’ll often just plant whatever the landscape architect says.
Are you talking more about like the landscaping, the lawn? Or are you talking more about the vegetable gardens that a lot of people grow?
I’m talking about the lawn. I’m talking about cutting back on the lawn, on the actual grass in your lawn. Of course, in a place like Denver, planting more of a zero scape or more drought-tolerant species are going to make a lot of sense and the native species that occur here are naturally more drought tolerant because this is naturally a drier area so planting those species, or as many as you can, is going to do wonderful things for birds. A good friend of mine, Edwina von Gal, she’s a landscape architect, she lives in Long Island, she actually started —
Oh, that’s where I’m from.
Okay, nice, so maybe you know her. She’s a pretty well-respected landscape architect. She started an organization called Two Thirds for the Birds and Doug Tallamy is actually an advisor for the organization. I am also an advisor on that organization, it’s 234birds.org, and the idea is just to plant two-thirds of your plants in your garden with native species so focus on the natives and you can find native plants from Colorado in a variety of places. The Colorado Native Plant Society has really good information.
Is there an easy way, no matter where someone lives, to identify, like if someone driving around town naturally sees this type of grass, it’s more likely to be a native species to their particular region?
Not necessarily. We have a lot of invasive species that have gotten out of the landscape and so just what you’re seeing on the roadside might not be native, it might be an invasive species that’s brought in from elsewhere. So, the best way is to consult organizations like the Colorado Native Plant Society. They have brochures with all the native plants. It’s absolutely gorgeous. If you’re unsure which plants those are or what they’re going to look like in combination, you can certainly consult Colorado Native Plant Society. Denver Audubon does a little bit of work with them as well and they have brochures that they’ve put together with a variety of different plants that are great for restoring some semblance of what would occur naturally in your garden and, therefore, provide a home for the birds that are going to move through your backyard. We need to think of our backyards as these small oases that very small patches of habitat that the birds can use and the more of us that are doing that, the better off the birds are going to be.
That makes sense because at the very beginning, you said the most basic form of birding anyone can do is just going into their backyard and watching the birds fly around, go into the bird feeder, or wherever they happen to hang out if there happens to be corn on the ground or something.
Exactly, exactly.
So that’s Two Thirds for the Birds and I think, also, most importantly, is just as much as you can do, like if someone could have their lawn be completely native species would be probably ideal.
Of course, that’s the ideal situation. 100 percent.
So, Ryan, it sounds like you have some real good clarity, both around the why you’re doing what you’re doing and the what kind of clarity around your purpose. What I’m wondering is, do you feel like this clarity around your purpose has helped you have more confidence in setting boundaries where you need to, when you come to like, say, “I can only commit to this much on this end, I can only commit to this much on that end”?
I’d say so. I think that’s always a struggle that we all deal with and it’s one thing that I have not perfected yet. I still see myself saying yes to things that maybe I shouldn’t say yes to, but I’m getting better. I think what’s important is that I am aware that I’m doing this when I probably shouldn’t be doing this. So certainly setting boundaries is something that has to be done in order to get things done. Otherwise, the world takes us for a ride and —
Yeah, pretty much exactly.
— and we don’t dictate what happens at the end of the day. I’ve been writing a book about my Peace Corps experience and during the pandemic, that’s what I did. I’d sit down and I would write every day and I’m very much into this book now. I’m nine chapters in and I’m envisioning it’s going to be a 12-chapter book so I’m almost finished with the book but I just haven’t been setting aside time to get it done and that’s one thing that I need to prioritize in my life and I need to say no to other things so that I can actually sit down and make the time to write.
Not only is it important to have that confidence and to set aside time and set the boundaries, but it’s also important, I want everyone out there listening to gather from this, is that even the people who I’m interviewing, everyone that’s made some progress or created their vision, they’re still part of that struggle, the struggle to have the confidence, the struggle to set the right boundaries, the struggle to be in the right mindset, the struggle to not slip back into some more regressive frequencies or fear-based mindset is something that we all encounter and we all have that day where we said to ourselves, “Okay, I intended to go to the gym, but, instead, I watched a bunch of mindless videos,” that happens to all of us. And so the key is not to excessively shame ourselves and to just understand that everyone’s on a journey. No one’s immune to it. Even the most successful person you see out there has probably had their moments of slippage. They had their moments where they let some hours get away from them or they made a bad decision or they let the world take them for a ride for a few hours.
Absolutely. I think that it’s really important to have that vulnerability to say, “Listen, this happens to me, it’s happened to me on many different occasions, and I am cognizant of the fact that it’s happened to me and I’m working to do better about it and I’m trying to figure out why it is that that happens to me,” and the path of less resistance is often the easiest path and we don’t want to do what’s hard and then that ends up stressing us out because we haven’t done what’s hard and then we know that we have more to do that’s hard.
That’s amazing, because there’s so many places in life where you encounter the same dichotomy where there’s the easy way and there’s the right way. Usually, the path of least resistance is also the path that’s going to lead you to the least amount of fulfillment. The ultimately easiest thing to ever do is flip that on button on the television. So, Ryan, I like to thank you for joining us. Now, I want to make sure my listeners also get a chance to get a hold of you or contact you if anyone out there listening is interested in going on a birding experience in the near future.
Absolutely, yeah. So I can be reached at ryan@gobirdingman.com. I think that’s probably the best way to directly contact me. Also, you can look at my website which is gobirdingman.com so you can get my contact, my phone number, my email is there, and also the number of products that I offer are there too. And then if you’re interested in doing something that is just very, very specific, I’m also open to the idea of just sort of customizing an adventure for you so we can certainly talk so feel free to reach out to me whenever.
And that’s Birding Man, not Burning Man, I don’t know if anyone ever asked you about that.
Well, I was struggling to come up with a name for the company and a friend of mine was like, “How about Birding Man? Kind of like Burning Man.” I was like, “That’s amazing,” yeah, so it was kind of a spin on Burning Man because actually I absolutely love Burning Man and what Burning Man stands for and many of the principles, the 10 principles of Burning Man, I’m trying to live through this company, things like self-reliance and environmental respect and communal effort, this idea of like radical inclusion, like anybody’s welcome, you don’t have to be an expert birder, like we can all be at different levels and still had this wonderful journey together. So, for me, Burning Man is an inspiration and that’s why I decided to take the name from, Burning Man.
So this goes to show even that little goofy thing that pops into your head can sometimes be way more insightful than you even imagine because I just thought, “Oh, yeah, Burning, Birding Man, whatever, you might get that mixed up,” someone probably asked you about that.
100 percent.
Definitely. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes and I’d like to thank everyone out there for listening. I would like to encourage all the listeners out there to find whatever path, whether it be birding or any other activity, to address this nature deficit disorder which we didn’t get around to talking about but I’m sure we’ve all had that thought and I like to encourage you to step back in or tune back in to Action’s Antidotes for more episodes where we’ll talk with people who are following their passions and pursuing what they really want to pursue and, oftentimes, on the same struggle that we’re all on in trying to set the right boundaries and set aside the time for what really matters and avoid some of these distractions or the sometimes overbearing expectations of some of the others in our lives.
Important Links:
- Email Address: ryan@gobirdingman.com
- Birding Man Adventures
About Ryan Dibala
Ryan has a background is in ecological field research and sustainable tourism. His research has taken him from raising and releasing bald eagles in California to monitoring scallop growth in Mexican estuaries. More recently, Ryan studied the population dynamics of nesting Cerulean Warblers and interactions between trees and grass in Panamanian silvopastures. Ryan first became interested in tourism when he spent two years developing a cultural conservation project with an indigenous community in Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer. He has since guided and facilitated college conservation biology programs in South Africa and Chile, worked on developing study abroad programs throughout Latin America, and guided professionally in Colorado. Ryan currently lives in Denver with his wife Angie and their dog Sushi. He holds a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Missouri and an M.S. in Biology from Ball State University.