For a long time, running meant catching up for me; on my training, and also on the latest news and stories. For years I was deeply locked into podcasts. Queued up like the first km’s at UTMB. News roundups, longform interviews, coaching theory, politics. Some work related, others for curiosity, and a few I barely enjoyed but couldn’t seem to miss (yes, at 2x the speed). With more interesting podcasts the longer the list became. I thought running would be a good time to learn, stay informed, et cetera. There was pressure in it. That’s what these tools do: a nudge that makes it feel like skipping an episode is falling behind.

I’m not against input. But lately, I’ve been paying more attention to what that input costs. This isn’t a manifesto against podcasts. I love them, not nearly as much as music, but still. This is something else though. This is about noticing a way back into myself, my routes, my habits, and rhythms. A way to be present in sound.

I’ve never worn headphones in nature. Not listening to anything feels natural. In fact, it feels unnatural otherwise. In the city, esp. on long efforts, I’d treat the earbuds like armor. Urban running can play with your mind, hours of sidewalks and crossing signals, there’s something comforting about having a voice in your head to pace the loneliness. When the boredom hit, I used to think the only way through it was distraction. When my phone died, I would think, damn, this is going to be harder now.

The last months, I’ve been trying something else: listening to birds intently (more than before). I used to, but sporadically. It started unintentionally. Just me and the Merlin app made by Cornell Lab. The app doesn’t allow you to play music or podcasts at the same time, which turned out to be a gift. So I ran with the mic on. Instead of streaming people’s voices into my ears, I started streaming my surroundings into the app. I began collecting birds, not to post, but to notice. First the easy ones: robins, cardinals, warblers, vireos. Then the ones that made me stop mid-step.

The first few outings without earbuds felt a bit off. Like I’d forgotten something. I suppose I had: the comforting blanket of continuous input. I know for some, the idea of running in silence can feel uncomfortable. That unease disappears surprisingly fast. What’s left in its place is a stillness so alive it hums. Footfall, breath, birdsong (or a squirrel), wind. Now suddenly my runs were full with detail.

We live in an age of uninterrupted content: news, ads, updates, opinions. Layered on top of one another like digital sediment. There’s always a headline to refresh, a take to process, a notification to clear, a checkmark to hunt for, or a late night doom scrolling. Even silence is curated, filled with someone’s calming voice narrating a mindfulness practice, or worse an AI generated Studio Ghibli, scored with ambient piano. We’ve become masters at filling space, with elevator music content, but not at inhabiting it.

The scarcest thing is not knowledge, but quiet. I didn’t think much of it. Now, 130 bird species later, I think I understand it a little better. Quiet isn’t just the absence of sound. It’s the absence of input. The moment when nothing external is telling you what to think, or how to feel, or what to click next. It’s rare and unsettling, grounding. This kind of listening isn’t passive. It’s not tuning out, but tuning in. Like coming home with your senses intact.

It’s not about escape or a void, and it’s not romantic. Sometimes it’s just standing under a tree wondering what type of woodpecker that is, or how many dee-dee-dee’s the Chickadee signals. It’s also this: the feeling of uncluttered attention. Of not needing to hold or perform or respond. Of simply noticing something wild, alive, entirely indifferent to your productivity. 

Running has a way of loosening the mind. Once I stopped filling it with other people’s words, I noticed the rhythm of my feet sync more with my surroundings. A cardinal’s call became part of my cadence. Listening to birds has made my eyes sharper. I see movement in the trees I used to miss. I look up a lot more. I anticipate where birds might perch. Even my breath and body feels more noticeable. As a sensor.

Before this shift, I don’t think I realized how often I was running through a place rather than running in it. Even without headphones in nature, my mind was often elsewhere, chewing deadlines, race plans, chores, mental to-do lists. My body moved forward, but my awareness lagged behind. Running was a means to many ends, rarely was it about attention.

I didn’t plan to stop listening to music or podcasts, it happened by accident. I had downloaded and used the app for some years. My curiosity about bird songs grew stronger. To use Sound ID, Merlin requires exclusive access to your microphone; you can’t play other audio simultaneously. That turns out to be an invitation. The only choice is: no podcast, no playlist, just ambient sound and listening.

Merlin is powered by eBird, the world’s largest birding database. It uses machine learning trained of thousands of recordings to identify bird songs in real time, even when multiple species vocalize at once. Merlin records ambient audio, converts it to a visual spectrogram, and compares that waveform to its database of annotated bird calls. It supports thousands world wide. It includes over 300 birds in the eastern side of Canada, and over 700 in North America. Sound ID can pick out a gray catbird in a noisy Brooklyn park, by matching its spectrogram signature to curated data.

Using the app on my runs, I realized the sound‑only mode transformed what I thought was accidental digital interference into a portal. The moment you launch Sound ID, your run shifts: the city noise, distant traffic, footsteps, everything becomes part of the soundscape. Merlin starts feeding you names in real time. A Shazam for bird songs. Each call feels like a gift. Within seconds it will display the bird. For the most part it’s very accurate.

Now that I am expert (cough cough), Merlin is a good app to either confirm what I am hearing is the bird I thought I identified, or use it to catch a “Lifer” (and see if I can find and recognize it). It has made birding very enjoyable. It’s not flawless of course. Mockingbirds, nearby traffic, or activity sounds (loud sneezes or squeaky trucks) trigger false identifications. It can misidentify rare species sometimes, which is why I try to double-check with visuals. That uncertainty, far from killing the magic, actually adds a layer of curiosity. A mini puzzle.

If the app doesn’t recognize the bird (like I stood next to several thousands of Gannets and it was not able to identify them), I try to take a picture and photo ID it myself or through the app. Still, it’s pretty reliable and impressive. When you confidently identify a bird, you tap “This is my bird!” to save it to your private Life List. I sparsely watch the app while running. It’s a companion at the background. I usually look at it when back home.

There’s a gentle delight that comes from hearing a call and knowing who it belongs to. It’s a real-time puzzle with no stakes. Like spotting a rare card in a Panini deck, or a new Pokemon. Yes, there is some gamification, but it’s not bad. Not with badges or streaks, nothing to post online. I’ve found myself chasing new neighborhoods or re-running the same trail just to try to hear that bird again. I check the daily emails with updates from experienced birders, and check if there’s a new bird in town.

The shift wasn’t about rejecting distraction. It was letting the world’s soundtrack take over. Birding, as it turns out, can recalibrate you. It taught me to listen. When your run becomes less about zoning out and more about projection (and what bird are named next) you’re present in a way that’s lived. Instead of zoning out or skipping to the next podcast, I scan trees, slow down at new sounds, reroute through parks to pass soundscapes, and distance from traffic. The landscape feels less like a backdrop. A neighborhood is a cacophony of loud distracting machines, but it’s still alive in other ways.

At this point, I can probably recognize about 50 birds by sound, without the app: a robin’s clear spring song, the mechanical trill of the chipping sparrow, the squeaky wheelbarrow call of the red-winged blackbird, blue jay’s theatrical loud screech, veery’s liquid call, red eyed vireos, cedar waxwings, downy woodpeckers, yellow warblers, American redstarts, cardinals, house finches and goldfinches, and so on. Others I still need help with, warblers especially, there are so many, but I’m getting better, visually too. The more I listen, the more I see.

This isn’t a pitch to quit podcasts or throw your earbuds away. I’m not suggesting a purist rule about how to run, or how to listen, or what counts as “real presence.” I still listen to music when I need the fire. I might still download a podcast before a treadmill session. And the stories they tell are absolutely worth telling. But this little practice, birding while running, has shifted something for me. It’s made room and loosened the grip I once had on needing everything to be productive in the measurable sense. Now, usually, it’s enough to hear the call of a chickadee and know it’s calling for. Or not know it, and just follow the sound a little longer.

There’s no pressure to make this your rule. Just an idea: birdsong and stillness can be an own kind of training. One that doesn’t show up on Strava or Instagram, but leaves you perhaps a little more grounded, more attuned and natural. A kind that tunes your senses the way strides tune your legs. Presence isn’t something we need to chase or optimized, and maybe can’t be scheduled or forced, but it can come on wings.