[Posted by Chuck Almdale]

Avian fakery runs amok.

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This one is very short, showing three birds in action and one going nuts.

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The next one, also very short, is sort of a how-to-pretend-you’re-a-bird and is just plain weird.

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The next video is longer, shows more birds, and finishes with a psychological analysis of why they’re doing it and what might work better to solve their “996” problems.

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Here’s a report from DW, a German news station, on bird-watching rather than bird-being. Supposedly three out of ten people in the U.S. are birdwatchers. (Maybe that’s Gen Z people.)

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The following is a CNN article about Gen Z people, focusing on those in Great Britain, who are taking up birdwatching with a passion.

Why Gen Z is going bonkers for birding

By Jack Bantock
Jul 28, 2026

Few people anywhere love birds more than Lira Valencia. Merely glimpsing the azure-blue flash of a Kingfisher flitting around her beloved corner of South London is enough to risk making her late for any engagement that day.

And yet, it’s a passion nested upon a barefaced lie.

Exasperated, like so many students, by the miserly state of the job market after graduating university during the pandemic, Valencia spotted a rare opening to put her zoology degree to good use in the field: a position with a bird charity in sunny Malta.

The problem? Eyeing London’s prodigious pigeon population marked the broad extent of her birdwatching pedigree. One pair of secondhand binoculars, a few trips around her local parks and a fib about her true level of birding experience later, she was taking flight to the Mediterranean.

“In my early 20s, if someone told me that I would be a bird watcher, I’d laugh because it’s just not something I ever thought of growing up,” Valencia, 30, told CNN.

“Obviously it started off as a lie, but then it actually started to really rub off on me. That’s the thing with it: once you start, you can’t really stop.”

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