48 Birdwatch•October 2017 http://www.birdguides.com/birdwatch
WELLBEING
DAVID FEATHERBE (WWW.DAVIDFEATHERBE.CO.UK)Five ways to
well-birding
The psychological bene ts of being out in nature are
many. Joe Harkness of Bird Therapy takes a look at
some practical ways in which you can use birding to
improve your wellbeing.wasn’t expecting it to correlate so well
with my new-found hobby of birding.
The fi ve ways to wellbeing is an
idea that was developed by the New
Economics Foundation (NEF) and is
endorsed by Mind (Mind 2013). It was
born out of a government Foresight
project that investigated the future
wellbeing of the British population.
The fi ndings were obviously quite
technical and NEF was asked to
summarise them for a wider audience,
resulting in the creation of the fi ve
ways. These outline fi ve things that
people can bring into their lives to help
improve their wellbeing. They are: to
connect, to take notice, to give, to learn
and to be active.
I challenge any birder not to look at
these fi ve areas and immediately seeW
hen I fi rst started writing my
book Bird Therapy, my early
research threw up a recurring
term which I had not heard before:
ecotherapy. Further reading informed
me that Mind, the leading UK mental
health charity, had coined the term,
defi ning it as ‘the name given to a
wide range of programmes that aim to
promote mental and physical wellbeing
through outdoor activity in a green
environment’. This seemed to match
my own ideas and I downloaded an
introductory document to fi nd out more.
In the opening paragraph, I
noticed a mention of the ‘fi ve ways
to wellbeing’. I had encountered
this framework when I fi rst started
exploring my own mental health, so it
was vaguely familiar to me. However, Ihow they overlay and intertwine with
our wonderful pastime. The more I
thought about all these crossovers and
correlations, the more I realised that this
model could be the foundation of Bird
Therapy as a writing project. Each could
provide a basic framework to write
around, and ultimately each sprouted its
own shoots of growth into new topics.
For the purposes of my writing I coined
my own moniker, calling them the ‘fi ve
ways to well-birding’.1 Connecting
Birding provides us with the perfect
platform for making connections, and
when I was starting out, one of the fi rst
things I did was try to connect with
others. I found a local birding group
and duly joined, which helped me to
build my knowledge and experiences by
meeting like-minded people.
I also used an online forum to
tentatively post in the hope of
connecting with more people, which
thankfully I did. The internet, and
specifi cally forums and social media,
are great ways of interacting with other
birders – especially at a local level. It
also seems to be where a lot of people
tend to post their sightings right now.
From my own experiences, it appears
that Twitter is the most popular
platform for birders and naturalists.
I recommend talking to anyone that
you see while out birding – you never
know, they could end up becoming a1
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