My dad kept a bird book with a life list penciled inside the front cover. I do not think he updated it very often. It was one of those things that surfaced years later in a box of older stuff he had cleared out, and when I found it, the list was short and the handwriting was from a version of him I did not really know. He was a wildlife biologist by trade, someone who spent his career working with black-footed ferrets and prairie grasses and bison. Birds were a side interest at best. But the book was there, and the marks were there, and it told me something about how he paid attention to the world even when he was not on the clock.

I grew up in the Black Hills, running around in the canyon behind our house whether I particularly wanted to or not. My dad’s approach to screen time was simple: he told us it was time to go outside. He was a hobbyist wildlife photographer on top of everything else, so nature was not something our family visited on weekends. It was the default setting. I would not have called myself someone who was “into birds” back then. But I was into being outside, and birds were part of what was outside, and that proximity matters more than I understood at the time.

Coming Back to It

I picked up birding casually during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which I suspect is true of a lot of people. Something about being home all day with limited options made the backyard feel more interesting than it had before. I put out a feeder, started noticing what showed up, and fell into that pleasant cycle of curiosity where one identification leads to a question that leads to another identification. It did not become a serious practice then, but the seed was planted.

More recently, I have been trying to make it more deliberate. My wife and I have four birdhouses in the backyard now, along with several feeders and a birdbath. We have been trying to create a space that is genuinely hospitable to whatever decides to show up. The practical constraints are real, though. We have an almost-two-year-old, and there is only so much you can bundle up a toddler before they start throwing gloves on the ground and demanding to be put down in the snow. So a lot of my birding happens from the back window or in early morning sessions when I can sneak out before the house wakes up.

What has surprised me in getting more intentional about it is how clearly birding illustrates something I think about constantly in my professional life: the difference between knowing about a thing and actually knowing it.

The Resources Are Not the Problem

There is no shortage of material on birds. Amy Tan’s book on backyard birding is a genuinely beautiful read. There are scientific deep dives on the inner lives of birds, field guides organized by region, and of course the big national guides that try to cover everything. I have found that I tend to prefer the smaller pamphlet-style guides put together by regional organizations, the ones published by local Audubon chapters or conservation groups specific to the Northern Great Plains. Those cut through a lot of noise because they are scoped to what you are actually likely to see where you live. Many of them are put together by people who are still alive and still reachable. You could email them with a question and probably get a thoughtful answer.

There is even a game I have been following called Flock Around, a social birding simulation where the bird models are designed to be as identifiable as possible. I have only played the demo with my wife, and the full release should have more depth, but the concept is charming: practice birding in a simulated environment, build familiarity with species, learn identification through something closer to experience than a flashcard.

And yet. None of it, not the books, not the guides, not the simulation, actually makes you a better birder the way that sitting in your backyard at six in the morning and watching does. The resources help. They give you vocabulary, frameworks, things to look for. But the knowing that comes from using them is fundamentally different from the knowing that comes from being there.

Epistemology in the Backyard

This is not a new observation in philosophy. Epistemology, the study of what knowledge is and how we come to have it, has long distinguished between different types of knowing. The version most relevant here is the distinction between propositional knowledge and acquaintance knowledge. Propositional knowledge is “knowing that”: I know that a black-capped chickadee has a distinctive two-note song. I know that house finches tend to visit feeders in small groups. These are facts I can state, verify, and transfer to someone else through language.

Acquaintance knowledge is different. It is “knowing” in the sense of familiarity, of direct personal experience that cannot be fully captured in propositions. I know the chickadees in my backyard. I know which one is bolder than the others. I know the particular quality of the light when the first juncos arrive in fall and what it feels like to watch a nuthatch work its way headfirst down a tree trunk three feet from where I am sitting. That knowing is not transferable in the same way. I can describe it, and a good writer like Amy Tan can describe it beautifully, but the description is not the thing.

There is also what Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge, the kind of knowing that resists articulation entirely. An experienced birder can identify a species by its movement pattern, its “jizz” (a real birding term, referring to the gestalt impression of a bird’s shape, posture, and behavior). They often cannot explain how they do this. They just know. That knowledge was built through thousands of hours of watching, and it lives in the body and the perceptual system as much as in the mind.

My own Zen practice has given me another way into this same idea. In koan study, there is a persistent emphasis on the difference between intellectual understanding and the kind of knowing that arises from direct experience. You can explain a koan’s logic and still not “get” it in the way that matters. The getting requires something beyond explanation. Birding, for me, has become a surprisingly clear secular parallel to that same gap.

What This Means for Learning Design

If we take this seriously as learning designers, the implications are uncomfortable. A significant portion of what we build, especially in online and asynchronous environments, is designed to produce propositional knowledge. We write learning objectives that begin with “identify,” “describe,” “explain.” We assess through quizzes and written responses that test whether someone can state a fact or apply a concept to a hypothetical scenario. And that work is not trivial. Propositional knowledge matters. You need to know what a chickadee looks like before you can notice one in the wild.

But we often stop there, or we treat propositional knowledge as if it were the whole picture. Pre-service teacher programs are a clear example. You can study classroom management theory, watch videos of experienced teachers, even run through simulations. All of that is better than nothing, in the same way that the Flock Around birding game is better than nothing. But everyone who has been through a teacher preparation program and then stepped into their own classroom for the first time knows the gap I am describing. The knowing that comes from having thirty real students looking at you is categorically different from the knowing that comes from reading about it.

The question for learning designers is not how to eliminate that gap. We cannot. Acquaintance knowledge and tacit knowledge require lived experience by definition, and no course design, no matter how thoughtful, can fully replicate that. The more productive question is how to build bridges between what learners encounter in a course and the lived knowing they carry with them or will eventually develop.

This is where I think reflection, application, and connection do their most important work. When an online course asks learners to connect a concept to something they have actually experienced, it is not just a pedagogical technique for improving retention. It is an epistemological move. It is asking learners to link propositional knowledge (the concept from the reading) to acquaintance knowledge (the thing they lived through), and in doing so, it deepens both. The concept becomes more than abstract, and the experience becomes more legible.

Similarly, when an instructor in an online course draws heavily on their own lived experience rather than just presenting content, they are modeling what acquaintance knowledge looks like. They are showing learners the texture and specificity that comes from having been there. That modeling cannot substitute for the learner’s own direct experience, but it can orient them toward it. It can help them recognize the gap between knowing about and knowing, and it can frame that gap as something worth crossing rather than something to be anxious about.

This is also why I think the “I did it imperfectly, you can too” posture matters so much in professional development and instructional content. When we share the messy, lived version of how we came to know something, we are implicitly acknowledging that the polished propositional version is incomplete. We are pointing toward the acquaintance knowledge underneath and saying: this is where the real understanding lives, and the only way to get there is to go through it yourself.

Knowing a Grackle

When my wife and I were recently married, we lived in an apartment with a big family of grackles outside our window. I thought they were just the noisy birds. But over months of proximity, I got to know them. They bugged each other. They woke up at weird times and yelled at one another. They had distinct personalities, or at least what I experienced as personalities, patterns of behavior consistent enough that I could anticipate what a particular bird would do. It was charming and funny and oddly grounding.

We do not get many grackles where we live now. But when someone tells me they saw a grackle, I know what that means. I do not just know what a grackle is. I know a grackle. The difference between those two sentences is small on paper and enormous in practice. It is the difference between propositional knowledge and acquaintance knowledge, between reading the field guide entry and having watched one steal food from another at five in the morning while you were still in your pajamas.

I am not sure learning design has fully reckoned with that difference. We are very good at building systems that produce the first kind of knowing. The second kind is harder to design for, and it may be impossible to design directly. But we can design toward it. We can create the conditions where it is more likely to happen. And we can stop pretending that the first kind is all there is.