Ed Yong:
Since we’ve been doing this talk, I have seen, out the window, about two crows, about a dozen cedar waxwings, one hermit thrush, one Bewick’s wren, a couple of yellow-rumped warblers, and that’s just life now. I think it just makes you realize it’s all just there. It’s right there. Nature is on my doorstep. There are all these incredible species around us all the time.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show, a podcast about the human drama of saving animals. This season, we’re talking to all kinds of nature advocates, from a paleoanthropologist who hunts fossils in conflict zones to someone who helped save an endangered species while in prison. We’re going to hear from real life heroes with widely different expertise and life experiences about what led them to be champions for the natural world. What transformation did they go through to create change within themselves, their community, and the world? Together, we’ll find out how these ordinary people fell in love with nature and became their most extraordinary selves. This is Going Wild.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
In this episode, I’m talking to Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and author Ed Yong from his home in Oakland, California.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Hi, Ed.
Ed Yong:
Hi, Rae. Hello.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
From 2015 to 2023, Ed was a staff writer for The Atlantic, where he reported on overlooked aspects of nature and animals, uncovering truth and wonder in the unknown, from mind-controlling parasites to the Ebola outbreak in the Congo. Ed’s COVID-19 coverage, particularly his eye-opening reporting on long COVID, shaped how millions understood the pandemic, earning him the Pulitzer Prize. In this conversation, Ed opens up about the toll pandemic reporting took on his mental health. We’ll hear how stepping away from pandemic reporting to write his book An Immense World and taking up birding helped him find renewed joy, and why curiosity, empathy, and a childlike fascination with nature might be exactly what we need to reconnect with and save the world around us, as well as to foster community in times of need.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Gosh, Ed, you are just such an interesting person, but I want to start with something just easy to kind of get us calibrated together. How would you say you first fell in love with science?
Ed Yong:
I honestly can’t remember, because I think I have loved the natural world for as long as I can remember loving anything. I remember being a kid who wanted to go to zoos, who wanted to watch nature documentaries. It was all wildlife, all the time.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Well, I can relate to that.
Ed Yong:
Right? Yes.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And I think it’s a beautiful way to be curious as a child. And so today, and for a while, you have been a writer, and a tremendous writer. And so I’m curious, how would you say that transition was, from being a kid who loves animals to being a writer?
Ed Yong:
For a long time, I thought my way of acting on that love was to actually be a scientist myself. And sort of weirdly, when I pursued a scientific path in high school and college, biology was sort of not really the focus of it. I think that, for various reasons, including maybe being made to feel that this love of wildlife was like a side thing, rather than the main thrust of my life, I don’t think I ever thought I could make a career out of that. And when I started a PhD program, it was in molecular biology. I thought that was the path forward. And it turned out to really not be the path forward. I think that was clear quite early on. I guarantee you that I was one of the top 10 worst PhD students of all time. By any objective measure, I was terrible at this and I hated it. I was trying to work out what else to do.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
After walking away from his brief stint as a PhD student, Ed took on a day job. And then in 2006, he started a science blog as a way to sharpen his writing skills and to explore topics that interested him.
Ed Yong:
It was just me writing about the things that I loved the most, which was substantially wildlife, but a lot of other areas of biology. I think at the time I described my beat as anything that is or was once alive.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Over the years, Ed tackled intriguing questions like why octopus arms don’t get tangled, and published numerous articles on his blog with titles such as Brainless slime mold makes decisions like humans, or The Barnacles That Eats Glowing Sharks.
Ed Yong:
It proved to me that I actually enjoyed doing this. It gave me a ton of practice at writing, and it proved to other people, like actual magazines and newspapers, that I could write. And the blog unquestionably launched my career.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
With his blog as a springboard, Ed was able to build a successful career as a freelance science writer, and eventually, in 2015, he joined The Atlantic as the publication’s first staff science journalist, though he couldn’t have predicted any of this at the time.
Ed Yong:
In no point during this did I ever have a five-year plan that accurately reflected what the future would really look like. I also told people at the time that I was never going to write a book.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Oh, look at you!
Ed Yong:
Right? Right? I don’t know what to say. I think focusing on the quality of the work above all else, because that does mean that when you get the right opportunities, you can actually make the most of them.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I love this, absolutely. And so the book, you have several, but An Immense World is what we’ll focus on today.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
An Immense World is Ed’s second book. In it, Ed takes an immersive deep dive into the sensory worlds of other animals. It’s a guide for imagining how all kinds of different species, from dogs to the giant squid, experience the world around them.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
In the book, there’s this German word, umwelt. I would call that essentially the driving concept of the book, right?
Ed Yong:
Yes.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
It’s like this reoccurring theme here.
Ed Yong:
Umwelt is just German for environment, but in this context, it has a specific meaning that is not just the physical environment. So, my umwelt is not the shed I’m currently working in, my umwelt is the sights and textures and smells and sounds that my sense organs, my eyes, my ears, my nose, give me access to. The crucial thing about this concept is that the umwelt varies from one individual to another, and certainly from one species to another. If my dog was here next to me, his umwelt would be very different. It would include a lot more smells, fewer colors, different frequencies of sound. We would be sitting in basically the same physical space, but our experience of that space would be radically, radically different.
Ed Yong:
I think that the umwelt concept is really profoundly beautiful. It tells us that our experience of the world is always partial. Even for an animal like us, very intelligent, a lot of technology at our disposal, we are still only perceiving just this thin sliver of the full world. For that reason, the concept is also very, very expansive. It tells us that there are hints of the unfamiliar in all the most familiar settings. Like this garden that I’m looking out now is something I stare at every day, but I never see the parts of the garden that the birds see, I never smell the parts of the garden that my dogs smell. Lurking in this totally everyday space are just extraordinary things that I can’t access. And so the book is an attempt to convey how much richer and deeper the world around us is through the sensory abilities of all the animals that we are fascinated by.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So, there is a field that is essentially sensory biology, and you explored this field for the book, and you also wrote that it appears that a lot of sensory biologists are somehow perceptually divergent, so maybe some kind of colorblindness, and that perhaps the differences that the biologists themselves as humans experience kind of predispose them to kind of stepping out of their own umwelt to embrace those of other creatures. And I’m curious, is there something about your own identity that kind of predisposed you to be interested in this as well?
Ed Yong:
I’m not neurodivergent in the same way, but I think that this field touches on values and themes that run throughout all of my work: curiosity and empathy. We’ve talked about the curiosity piece, I’ve been fascinated by the natural world since I was a kid, I want to know how it works. You tell me that every animal around me is perceiving part of the world in a way that I don’t understand, I want to know all about all of it.
Ed Yong:
And I think the empathy piece is crucial to this too. I’m just interested in the lies of others, whether it’s other people or other animals. I want to be able to step into their shoes, and it sort of manifests in the work in a lot of different ways. So, a lot of my pandemic work is about trying to look at the hidden systems in our society that make us so susceptible to new and rapidly spreading pathogens, and it’s about trying to look at the experiences of groups of people who were hardest hit by COVID, and whose stories are often forgotten. So, everyone from immunocompromised people to long-haulers to healthcare workers. So, all of that, even though superficially it seems like they’re about completely different things, are really about trying to say there are so many parts of the world that are hidden from our everyday experience and that really, really matter, and we should try to understand them, and we should want to understand them.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And not only that curiosity and empathy is the driving force behind Ed’s seemingly unrelated writings, for Ed, An Immense World and the COVID-19 pandemic are inextricably linked, because while he was in the middle of writing his book, the pandemic broke.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Can you tell us what was that like, to be writing about the wonders of the natural world and a lot of beauty, and then having a global pandemic hit? And how jarring was that? Because we all experienced something very jarring, but for you, this is deeper.
Ed Yong:
Yeah, so, I took book leave in October 2019 to actually write the book, and it was going to be a 10-month period. Then, for obvious reasons, in March 2020, I paused book leave, the book was half done, and I went instead to report on the pandemic. And that was because I had actually been thinking about pandemics for a while, I’d written some pieces about it, I wrote a big feature for The Atlantic in 2018 about how we would probably do badly if a pandemic hit us. So, given all of that, when one actually did happen, it felt like this is something I absolutely have to report on, and I know enough to be able to make an actual difference to our narrative and the people’s decision-making and maybe even their lives. So, it felt like a question of duty and responsibility to do that.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
In the months that followed, Ed became steeped in pandemic reporting day in and day out, speaking to public health experts, hearing firsthand accounts from healthcare workers and COVID patients and survivors. His reporting on long COVID was especially eye-opening. It helped a lot of people understand the very real and serious struggles that COVID long-haulers face. But as a reporter, Ed couldn’t really take a break from COVID news. The pandemic became his entire world, and all of this took a toll on him.
Ed Yong:
I was in pretty bad shape at the end of 2020. Pandemic reporting is probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do. It was crushing for my mental health.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So, in January 2021, Ed took a step back from his pandemic reporting at The Atlantic. He resumed his book leave and set out to finish writing An Immense World.
Ed Yong:
It is saying something about what pandemic reporting is like that writing half a book in four months felt like going to the beach-
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Oh my gosh.
Ed Yong:
… for a vacation. I mean, it was also very hard work, but it was joyful work. I’ve likened writing about the pandemic to just staring straight into the sun without blinking, and writing about umwelt is a lot like basking in the sun. It’s a thing that’s actually delightful. And I think getting into that headspace and slipping into that world of joy for four months, truly, it made a huge difference to my mental health.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Even though writing 60,000 words in four months saved Ed in many ways, he wasn’t so sure that the rest of the world, gripped by a pandemic and in the midst of a lockdown, would share his delight and curiosity about the umwelt of other animals.
Ed Yong:
The pandemic work, I know, made a difference in people’s lives. It won big journalism awards. It felt like the right kind of journalism. And now I was sort of stepping back from it to do this other work, and I wasn’t sure how it would be received. I didn’t know if people would say, “It’s honestly ridiculous that instead of choosing to continue to do pandemic work, you’re going to write about your animal book?” I said that even when I was a teenager at school, I kind of felt that the animal thing was like a side thing. It was-
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Like you were kind of socialized to believe that?
Ed Yong:
Yes, right. Almost as if, I don’t know if you’ve felt this in your work, that to love animals is almost like a childish thing, because it’s a thing that we associate with kids. There’s a part of the world that makes you feel that it’s unserious.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I agree. I know that I myself have never said it like that, so I appreciate you using this language. For me, I fell in love with animals and the natural world through watching television. I was such an urban kid that it was on TV, and TV is not serious, right? It’s entertainment.
Ed Yong:
Yes. Yes to all of that. How do we interact with animals if we’re not actually doing naturalist stuff as kids? It’s through things like TV. It’s like going to zoos. Again, that feels like a kind of kid thing. And I think that ethos kind of followed me into professional spaces. I think since I started science writing, there has been this feeling among science journalists that if you write the cool animal stories, it is slightly unserious. It’s not like the real work of journalism, which is to do hard-hitting investigative stuff that exposes problems in our society. And if you write about, “Oh, this awesome bird has this one cool trick”, “This parasite’s a bit gross”, I certainly felt, for a long time, that that was a cheaper way to be a journalist.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
This feeling of being an “unserious journalist” lingered throughout his career, even while working as a staff writer for The Atlantic and after publishing his first book. And if it wasn’t for a conversation with his wife, who knows if An Immense World would even exist?
Ed Yong:
Early 2019, I was sitting in a cafe in London on a very rainy morning with my wife, Liz Neeley, who is amazing, and sort of just saying, “I don’t really have an idea for a second book.” I felt like these types of stories that I was writing, what were they for? Do they matter? Does it matter to write stories about the wondrous nature of the natural world, when we have all of these existential threats facing us? And I think Liz very beautifully made the argument that it does matter. It does matter, because if people don’t care about the natural world, they will never feel compelled to want to protect it, to savor it, to do any of that.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Well, it’s interesting to hear that self-doubt played such a big role throughout the trajectory of this.
Ed Yong:
Throughout the trajectory. And I also didn’t know whether the book would sell. I really thought people wouldn’t buy this, right? Some people would buy it. You and I might buy it, but in general, the public would not buy it, and especially, God, in the middle of a pandemic. So, I thought I didn’t know it would do well. And then it did, beyond all of my dreams for it. It went big, big. I won a writing award for non-fiction, full stop. Not like science books, but just like non-fiction. It was on the bestseller list for months. And I predicted none of this.
Ed Yong:
So, I think the fact that I wrote this book about the natural world, it is entirely about the natural world for its own sake, and people, in this very, very dire, bleak time in our history went, “Yes. I would like that. More of that, please,” makes me extremely happy. To me, it means that a lot of these doubts that have been plaguing me for my entire career don’t really hold up, that there is a desire to learn more, to show that curiosity and empathy about wildlife, about other creatures. And I have my pandemic work and I have An Immense World. And these are two things that I did that are very, very different and that I’m both equally proud of. And the fact that I’m equally proud of them is, I think, a huge thing for me personally.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
This is very powerful, especially recording this today, when myself and lots of people I know are kind of struggling with our perceptions or our judgments on society, and you talking about feeling pride in people.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
We’ll hear more from Ed Yong on how that pride in people and his connection to community has been strengthened by a new-found hobby that’s pushed him to explore nature in ways he never had before: birding.
Ed Yong:
I care about space and time in a way that I didn’t use to. I care about the tides. I think about when different birds are active at different times of the day, so I could find them. I know that kind of granular detail and I’m always paying attention to this stuff.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
We’ll be right back.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
After finishing his book, An Immense World, in four months, Ed went back to work and filed a few more stories for The Atlantic, and then he made the decision to leave his staff writing position permanently. And in 2023, Ed and his wife Liz moved from Washington, D.C. to Oakland, California. And since moving to the Bay Area, Ed’s life has taken a turn that’s both surprising and yet completely natural for someone who loves animals as much as Ed does.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Ed, birding is a part of your life today, and animals-
Ed Yong:
Yes, it is.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Animals have been a love and an interest and a passion of yours since as long as you can remember. But why birds? Not everyone who loves wildlife loves birding.
Ed Yong:
To me, birding is about making specific efforts to look at birds, and for no other reason. So, it’s not because I am on a hike and happen to see a hawk, it’s I’m going somewhere so that I can look at the birds there. And that specificity of intent and effort is what, to me, defines birding. And if we’re defining it that way, that is all new. I have loved animals since I was a kid, but that love manifested in a way that I now think of as a little academic. I was gathering knowledge and fun facts about the natural world, but I wasn’t in it. I wasn’t a naturalist kid, I wasn’t tromping through forests and looking under rocks and doing that kind of thing. And so birding, going out into the field with binoculars and a camera, trying to find birds, that is new, and it’s a way of interacting with nature that I had not experienced even through all the rest of it, through writing An Immense World, through being a science writer.
Ed Yong:
So, why did this happen? A lot of birders talk about having spark birds, like it’s the one species that turns you into a birder. I didn’t have that. I moved to Oakland in May of ’23. So, one thing that’s immediately obvious is in this neighborhood, there are so many birds. I hear them, I see them all the time. And one of my really good friends now, her name is Jenny Odell, and she was out of the country for a few weeks. So, she gave me her field guide that she had marked up with all the most common backyard birds.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Was it premeditated? Did you kind of decide like, “Okay, you know what? I want to start birding, so I’ve got to buy the binoculars, and get the field guide, and then have my stuff and go out”?
Ed Yong:
So, I had no intention of being a birder. The thinking was more like, “Well, I know there are hummingbirds in my yard, and there are other cool things I can see. Why don’t I get a pair of binoculars so I can look at them when I’m sitting and just reading? Oh, now I have a pair of binoculars. We have all of these great natural spaces around us that we go for hikes in all the time. I’m going to take my binoculars on that walk and see what I can see. Oh, I’m starting to see more stuff. I should look at the field guide and find out what I’m seeing.” So, it all just happened quite slowly.
Ed Yong:
And I realized that it was good for me. When I was doing it, a lot of other things fell away. I have a bunch of anxieties rattling in my head almost all times. And when I’m birding, those go away. Things become very, very quiet and very focused, and I’m very present. If I’m trying to find the rare bird that I know is here, my eyes and my ears are completely focused on the task, and I am in this zone that is very clarifying.
Ed Yong:
I also started realizing that it has made the natural world feel accessible to me in a way that it has never felt before. I’ve written about all of this amazing animal behavior throughout my life, and for most of that time, I think it has always felt a little exotic. It’s the type of thing that folks like you get to see it. Folks like me, writing at my desk, we don’t see that. I might go on a safari to see nature in its grandest, but otherwise, it’s something that exists on my TV screen or on my laptop or on my keyboard.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I was going to say, just like as kids, it’s still on TV. It’s still-
Ed Yong:
Yes!
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
… on your phone.
Ed Yong:
Yes! Yes! And so when my friend Jenny gave me that field guide, one of the things I really remember was looking through it and thinking, “Okay, well, I’ll probably see the chickadee, or the ones that she’s marked as a backyard bird, but I’m not going to see most of these birds. If a bird says ‘rare’ next to it, what are the odds I’ll see that? Slim to none. I’m not going to see a golden eagle, are you mad?” Right? But now I can drive 45 minutes east from my house, and go to a place where I’m pretty sure I can see a golden eagle within an hour or so. I know where to find them. I have gone to places where I have heard owls hooting each other at night. I have found 273 species of birds in my county this year.
Ed Yong:
Since we’ve been doing this talk, I have seen, out the window, about two crows, about a dozen cedar waxwings, one hermit thrush, one Bewick’s wren, a couple of yellow-rumped warblers, and that’s just life now. I think it just makes you realize it’s all just there. It’s right there. Nature is on my doorstep. There are all these incredible species around us all the time. It takes a little effort to learn what they look like and what they sound like, to learn where and when they can be found. But you can absolutely find them. And that has felt like such a gift. It has made so much of what I write about feel less abstract to me, and so much closer to literally my daily life.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
It sounds like a transformation, which I’m sure you couldn’t have predicted. And I have to say, I live in Santa Barbara, and the Pacific Ocean is just right here. And I take a morning walk, and I think that there is a white-tailed hawk in my neighborhood. And I don’t know if that’s accurate, but it’s this huge bird. It’s up at the top of a eucalyptus tree, and she has such a large breastbone. It is huge. And I went on a walk this morning and I saw her, and I went home and pulled out my binoculars. But I realized that I pulled out my binoculars for a bird for the first time. And when I go on my walk tomorrow, I’m going to bring them.
Ed Yong:
Yes, I sympathize with this a lot. It sounds like maybe this is going to be your future spark bird, who can say?
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Yeah.
Ed Yong:
I think birds are wonderful, in part because their lives just overlap with ours so much, and yet they are so radically different, that something like the hawk that you see just feels like this alien god.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
You’re making this extremely good point about the intersections of human lives and bird lives, right? And how we are in community with one another. Can you give us some examples of the umwelt of birds, that, although we are together, we are experiencing our community so differently?
Ed Yong:
Totally. So, let’s start with vision, because that is a sense that, for those of us humans who can see, is primary. It’s also really important to birds, too. The cedar waxwings I can see out of my window, their eyes are on the sides of their heads. That means that their visual field wraps around them, so they can see to the sides and behind themselves. That’s very different than my experience of the world. So, to me, the visual world is always in front of me, and when I walk forward, it comes towards me. Whereas a bird’s visual world surrounds them. So, when they walk forward, it goes towards them and away from them at the same time, they are immersed in it. Birds can see a lot more colors than we can see. Most people have three kinds of cone cells that are responsible for color discrimination in our eyes. Birds have four kinds, and that means that they probably see a hundred times more colors than we can see.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
One of those colors that birds can see that we can’t is ultraviolet, a color just beyond the violet end of the rainbow. For animals that can detect UV, like many species of birds and pollinating insects, the natural world looks really different. For instance, many flowers, like sunflowers, which to us appear to be plain yellow, to animals that can see UV, they have a vivid bull’s eye pattern. Imagine a halo emanating from the center of the flower, guiding pollinators to the flower’s nectar. But flowers aren’t the only ones that have these vivid UV patterns. Bird feathers have them too.
Ed Yong:
One of the birds that was on this tree, it was an American robin. Everyone knows what that looks like. Most people can’t tell the difference between males and females.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sure, yeah. They have a red breast, and they all look the same, to the untrained eye.
Ed Yong:
To the untrained eye and to the human eye. To the robins themselves, the male robin’s breast is red and ultraviolet, and the female’s kind of isn’t. So, male and female robins can tell each other apart super easily, humans cannot.
Ed Yong:
And then when you go away from vision and go into the other senses, there are some really interesting things too. So, a lot of the songbirds that I can see right now have a magnetic sense. So, they can tell which way to go, even if all of the landmarks around them are invisible. If I put them in this room and drew the curtains, they would still know which way to go because they have these inbuilt compasses in their heads and perhaps even their eyes. There’s one line of thought that maybe these birds might be able to see the Earth’s magnetic field.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
This internal compass helps migrating birds determine their position and direction. Along with celestial cues like the position of the sun and stars, birds use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate when they travel long distances.
Ed Yong:
For the longest time, people thought that birds couldn’t smell, but they can smell, and pretty well. If you look out your window with some binoculars, there’s a good chance you’ll see seabirds flying in the distance, so, things like shearwaters. Those birds have an incredibly good sense of smell. And to them, the surface of the ocean isn’t this featureless, flat terrain that it looks like to us, it’s this rolling topography of smells and scents, valleys and mountains that correspond to the level of food in the water.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Even as someone who works a lot with wildlife, I can still appreciate these little snippets of birds’ umwelt because I will never look at the birds in my backyard or the seabirds out my office window the same way. It opens up the natural world in small but enriching ways, even when I’m not out doing fieldwork. And for Ed, this everyday access to nature is something he wants to share with one community in particular.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
You took initiative to start a club, a birding club, specifically for people who have chronic illness, people who’ve experienced long COVID, which is something that you really wrote so much about when you were with The Atlantic. How did you come up with this idea, and how is it different?
Ed Yong:
Yeah, thank you for asking about this. So, COVID infections, if you don’t end up in the hospital, can resolve quite quickly, but they can also persist. It’s not necessarily if the virus is still doing its thing, but your symptoms keep on going, new ones may arise. And the upshot is a lot of people, months and years on from their bout with the virus, are still sick, and sometimes very, very sick. Many of the common symptoms have terms that make them sound much more everyday than they are, but they include things like fatigue. And when I say that, I don’t mean the fatigue that I feel when I stay up too late or get jet lag. I mean a crushing, debilitating fatigue that makes you feel like not only are your batteries drained, but they don’t exist at all, that even household tasks, like doing laundry, like taking a shower, can feel like they are undoable.
Ed Yong:
The symptoms might include things like brain fog. And again, not the way in which if I have a hangover, I can’t think, but just having this conversation, for example, would be too much. A lot of people have a thing called post-exertional malaise, where even small amounts of physical or mental activity knock them out for days or weeks.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Gosh.
Ed Yong:
It’s a very debilitating illness, and almost worse than the physical symptoms is the dismissal and gaslighting. People tell them that it’s in their heads, that they are just depressed, they’re being lazy, that they should just get over it, that it’s not real.
Ed Yong:
So, I’ve been writing about this since the start of my pandemic work, and this community has come to matter a lot to me. And my long COVID pieces are some of the work that I’ve done that I’m proudest of. Many people with these illnesses tell me that they very rarely go outside, because so much of what we think of as outdoor exercises are like high-intensity outdoor exercises. The other thing that people with these illnesses often tell me is that they don’t have community, because all of their friends and their families and their employers and their loved ones just don’t get it.
Ed Yong:
So, when I started birding, it became clear to me that some parts of this hobby are inaccessible to this group. For example, there’s often cases where I’m hiking long distances to bird. But often, I’m just standing in the same place. I am going to a clearing in a forest, and I’m just staying there for an hour and watching birds, and doing very, very little. And I realized like, “Wait, this could be great for this community.” So, I reached out to a few people I know who have long COVID and said, “Hey, if I just arranged birding trips for you guys, is that something that you would enjoy?” And they said yes.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And that’s how The Spoonbill Club was born, a birding club in the Bay Area for people with long COVID or other energy-limiting chronic illnesses, because there are a lot of them. And like long COVID, they’ve also been ignored.
Ed Yong:
We go out every month, we walk maybe like a half a mile to a mile over the course of two hours, so really not very much, very slowly, always on flat, accessible trails, I bring folding stools in case people need to tap out and sit down, we have a couple of guides, and it has meant a lot to me. And I think it matters to me as an abled person to be trying to help this community, because I think one thing they often find is unless someone also has long COVID, they don’t care.
Ed Yong:
You and I have talked about how it is a difficult time. We, and probably many of the people listening to this, are struggling with what to do right now. I think for me, the immediate solution has been to double down on my local community, to find the people around me who I can hold and visit, and strengthen every one of those ties as much as I can. And The Spoonbill Club matters to me because I think it’s a way of extending that same premise. Long-haulers have done the most incredible things. They’ve done research, they’ve advocated for themselves, all with these symptoms that radically sap them of energy. So, they are the heroes here, they have all of the agency power they need. It’s a way of giving them something, a space in which they can find community with each other, and to know that this whole world is still accessible to them.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And that’s where we’ll end. Thank you so much, Ed, you’re just a tremendous person, and just wonderful person to be in conversation with during this time.
Ed Yong:
Thanks, Rae. I hope it was everything that you are hoping for and, yeah.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And more. And so much more.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Ed Yong is the author of I Contain Multitudes and An Immense World. You can find Ed’s beautiful photography of the birds he encounters in his newsletter, The Ed’s Up.
