Okay, so he was dead. But he was also the most stunning wild bird I’d ever seen—probably ever would see. I’d been walking the city alleys of Bloomington, Indiana, when I nearly stepped on a lovely-but-lifeless Indigo Bunting. I recall lightly pinching his paper-thin body between my thumb and index finger. With the smallest movement of my wrist I could make his electric blue head flop from one side to the other. His snapped neck made sense. After all, the neotropical migrant navigates with the stars. Flying at night, he probably never noticed that eight-story brick building smack in the middle of the city’s buzzing downtown—until he smacked into it himself, of course.

True, mine was not exactly the sort of encounter most birders relish, but it served as my first glimpse of a relatively new pastime—urban birding. Sound like an oxymoron? Plenty of modern-day birders are happy to report it’s not. While traditional birders go the distance to see their quarry in preferred habitats, their urban counterparts are happy to stay home, instead scanning their own concrete-covered environs for avian treasure. Greg Links, an avid birder and trustee at large for the Toledo Naturalists’ Association, does a little of both. Sometimes he steals out on his lunch hour to look for migrants passing through downtown in the spring and fall. “It’s a quirky little game,” he says. What kind of goody can we turn up in the middle of all of this?”

During one fall field trip Links and a group of urban birders found 58 species in an afternoon. “Those birds were all in downtown Toledo. Now, there were a couple of spots that were pretty wooded, so that was kind of cheating a little bit,” he says. One of Links’s favorite finds to date? A Connecticut Warbler walking along the library square. “That’s a surprise. That’s a bird of the Northern spruce bogs, and there it is walking on the sidewalk. With [urban birding] it’s not so much the rarity of the bird as it is the uniqueness of the context,” he explains.

It’s not easy to pin down just who these newfangled birders are. According to the 2000 Census, more than 46 million Americans say they birdwatch in some form. “The demographics of birding in general have shifted fairly recently. It used to be two groups: the stereotypical little old ladies with their sneakers and binoculars, and then the other group of real hotshot, hard-core types who go out alone and list as many birds as they can,” Links notes. And now? There are still those intense loners who live to look for birds and list those they find all by themselves, thank you very much. (Links counts himself among them: “We’re out to go birding, not kibbitzing!”) But that’s changing. “Today I would say birding is probably pretty evenly split between men and women, and they are going out in groups,” says Links. Turns out, there really isn’t an “average” urban birder. At least not yet, anyway. And there isn’t any one reason why people scour their cities for birds.