My wife is a wildlife biologist by training and a much better birder than I am. She started as a child, while I didn’t notice birds until I was 26. She has the eyesight of a hawk, while I have a severe visual handicap.

Yet, she does few things that most birders do. She has never kept a life list, much less even tallied the birds after an outing. She has never used Ebird or any kind of app. She takes binoculars and maybe a field guide with her when she goes out. It’s not as if she has no skill for quantifying fauna – quite the contrary: she has boxes of detailed field notebooks from years of tracking elk and antelope for her research.

If she cared to tick birds, she’d have over 5,000 species. That isn’t chump change in the realm of birding currency. She knows she’s crossed this numerical threshold, but only because I have. I obsess about my life birds like Silas Marner brooding over his gold coins. And since we bird together, she has gotten every bird that I have, and then some.

Despite not being a lister, she will spend no less time studying target birds before a trip. She will make exacting efforts to get every identification correct in the field, and will be a very stickler that we must leave an unidentified bird in taxonomic limbo. But when an identification is clinched, she celebrates with unaffected glee and then… lets it go.

This has not been my style, at least not since I first started birding, but I’m trying it now. As we are taking a break from hardcore trips, it’s an opportune time for a birding Digital Detox. No phone, no lists, no constant tapping into eBird during or after an outing. I’m done with eBird and have now ported much of my audio over to xeno-canto, which will be the exclusive repository I use going forward for my recordings. That isn’t to say I won’t use eBird to simply manage my life list, but I’ve no desire to submit complete lists or media anymore.

“The psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds…” said the subversive teenager Clarisse in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Birding used to have a similar way of detaching me from the world, but of late it has become something else, something less authentic. There has been much talk of “mindful birding,” and I’m now seeing why that has such allure.

The post A Digital Detox: No More eBird for this Birder first appeared on Michael Hurben, PhD.