At the end of February, I was at a retreat where a colleague explained the difference between bird watching and birding. Birding, she told me, is about attention. Sometimes, you begin by learning the silhouettes of birds before the names. You notice the way one bird rides the wind while another cuts through it. More than the birds themselves, I found myself fascinated by people who had trained themselves to keep looking up. Before long, I realized the birds are never absent but some of us had simply forgotten the practice of noticing.
I have been thinking about that conversation ever since.
A few weeks later, I read that a pair of California condors in Northern California were believed to be tending an egg, perhaps the first in the region in more than a century. What captivated me was not simply the possibility of a new chick but the way biologists came to that conclusion. The nest sat hidden high inside a redwood cavity, beyond human sight. They could not see the egg itself. Instead, they watched the birds take turns returning to the same place, relieving one another with remarkable consistency, behaving in all the ways parents do when there is something fragile to protect.
There is something profound about trusting relationship over direct evidence. About believing an unseen future exists because of the care being extended toward it.
That image in my mind of these condors tending, led me down a path of reading about the condor and about the Yurok people, whose ancestral homelands include what is now known as Humboldt and Del Norte counties in Northern California and whose relationship with the bird stretches back long before the language of conservation or wildlife management. Along the way, I encountered the teaching of the eagle and the condor, shared in different forms by Indigenous communities across the Americas. While I hope to not collapse these traditions into one another, nor do I claim them as my own, I have found myself listening instead for the echoes between them and the questions they stir in my own life.
As I have come to understand it, the teaching speaks of two ways of moving through the world. The eagle is often associated with the mind, with intellect, invention, and the outward drive to build and organize. The condor is associated with the heart, with intuition, spirituality, and living in reciprocity with the earth. Some tellings describe a long period in which these ways fall out of balance, particularly through conquest and colonization, before imagining a future in which the eagle and the condor fly together again. The hope is not that one defeats the other but that balance is restored when intellect and relationship, vision and care, learn to exist together.
Which is to say, an empire can rename a mountain, redraw a border, fence off a river, or nearly erase a species, but it cannot erase a relationship. It can convince itself that a map is older than a migration route or that ownership runs deeper than memory, but the work of remembering continues anyway. The Yurok people carried their relationship with the condor even when the bird itself had nearly vanished from the sky.
When I first encountered that teaching, I surprised myself by thinking of a baaj.
Growing up Sikh, I remember seeing paintings of Guru Gobind Singh Ji with a baaj (falcon) perched on his arm so often that I never asked why it was there. It belonged to the landscape of my childhood as naturally as tying my rumaal before entering the gurdwara or hearing the harmonium sound before the first line of kirtan. Like many things we inherit young, I accepted it before I understood it.
Only later did I begin asking what the bird might be teaching. The baaj is remembered for discipline, courage, vision, and an unwillingness to live comfortably in captivity. But perhaps above all, it is a lesson in attention. A falcon survives because it remains in intimate conversation with the world around it, reading currents invisible to the untrained eye.
I think that is why the condor and the baaj found each other in my imagination —because both ask what it would mean to live in such close conversation with the world that domination no longer feels possible. And when I linger there, I start birding in my own mind. The condor gives way to the crane. The crane to the gull. The gull to the pigeon outside a train station. Then the crow perched on a telephone wire, carrying centuries of superstition in its feathers. I begin to notice not only the birds themselves but the stories we have draped over them. Which ones we call noble. Which ones we call pests. Which ones we fear. Which ones we refuse to see.
Years ago, there is a photograph of me outside the Daly City BART station trying to feed pigeons. I am crouched with my hand outstretched, smiling at a cluster of gray birds that seem unsure whether to trust me. Around us, commuters hurry toward their trains without looking down. The pigeons weave between shoes and coffee cups, as much a part of the station as the concrete beneath them.
I have returned to that photograph more than once, wondering what compelled me to stop for the pigeons. We call them the rats of the sky: dirty, invasive, disposable. We speak about them as though surviving in the cities we built were an offense against beauty itself. We forget that they once carried messages across impossible distances, that they have lived alongside humans for thousands of years, adapting to our architecture with a persistence we often mistake for nuisance.
The same comes with crows, as few creatures have been asked to carry so much of human fear. Across cultures it appears as an omen, a messenger of death, a shadow crossing the edge of the imagination. Yet crows themselves are astonishingly social. They remember faces. They teach their young. They gather around their dead. They warn one another of danger. Scientists describe memory and cooperation; poets have long described witness. Maybe, the deeper lesson hidden among all these wings is the work of noticing the hierarchies our minds creates without permission.
We reserve reverence for the condor because it is rare. We honor the baaj because it appears beside kings and gurus. We dismiss the pigeon because it is common. We fear the crow because we have inherited stories that tell us to. There is a line in Gurbani that has followed me for years: Pavan Guru, Pani Pita, Mata Dharat Mahat. Air is the teacher. Water is the father. Earth is the great mother. Every time I return to it, the hierarchy I inherited from modern life rearranges itself. The earth becomes kin instead of property. Water becomes relation instead of resource. Even the air becomes capable of instruction if I am willing to listen.
As I write and reflect, the World Cup is underway with the United States cohosting events, and yet we are seeing photographs of half-filled stadiums circulate alongside stories of immigration raids, visa anxieties, and families living with the uncertainty of movement. I find myself wondering, what does it mean to praise internationalism while entire communities weigh whether it is safe to leave home?
And then I think of birds and migration. The condor does not recognize the border between California and Mexico. The baaj does not alter its flight because someone has drawn a line across a map. The oldest routes across this continent were traced not by surveyors but by rivers, salmon, and migration itself.
As Sikhs, who are we if not people called to question the stories power tells about itself? Guru Nanak Dev Ji crossed kingdoms refusing the logic of caste and supremacy. Guru Gobind Singh Ji called people into courage rooted in responsibility rather than domination. We pray for sarbat da bhala, the flourishing of all. We practice langar, where the first act is not to ask where someone comes from but to make room for them at the table.
I keep returning to that photograph outside the Daly City BART station. At the time, I thought I was trying to feed pigeons. And yet, the pigeons were feeding something in me. They were teaching me that attention is a moral practice. That the world is not divided into creatures worthy of wonder and creatures worthy of dismissal until we make it so. That every hierarchy rehearsed upon the natural world eventually becomes a hierarchy rehearsed upon human beings.
Maybe the deepest work any of us can do is to unlearn the reflex that ranks one life above another. The quiet balance of creation.
Now when I think of birding, I think about what it takes to look up long enough to realize that the world is still speaking. Somewhere above the checkpoints and detention centers, above the stadium lights and sponsorship banners, above every nation convinced of its permanence, a condor is still riding a current of air older than memory. Somewhere in my own imagination, the baaj still rests beside Guru Gobind Singh Ji, reminding me that our deepest responsibility is not to master the world but to remain in right relationship with it. Perhaps that is what birding has been teaching me all along: not simply how to recognize a bird in flight, but how to recognize the stories I have inherited before they harden into the way I see the world.
The wind has never needed a passport, and the birds have never mistaken a border for the edge of the world.
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