Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline

I believe that we'll see a lot of "x is good for your brain" news (with X just being any activity that doesn't involve a screen), now that attention spans are so short and everyone feels like their brain isn't the same anymore. The same way we got gyms when people realized physical inactivity is super unhealthy.

Just a bit of anecdata (observer bias). A lot of, "birdwatchers" I see travelling to remote parts of Scotland and other places in the UK are generally wealthy retirees, with nice kit (Rab clothing, telephoto lenses, VW campervans). Cognitive decline is shown to impact disproportionately on less wealthy people. So is there a trend with economic wealth and outdoor hobbies like birdwatching? I'd hazard a yes. On a side note, the Merlin bird ID app from Cornell University is great.

This feels if nothing else quite analogous with default mode network, i.e. brain regions which are task-negative (or task-neutral). It seems that the literature supports the intuition that to meaningfully relax (i.e. exercise the brain with fewer pressures of time, success or similar, and with a relatively low information bandwidth) is really good for cognitive health. And it's very good to destress, which we can all benefit from! So even if there are more cars than birds outside my own window... I'll make sure to spend a few more moments each day by it :)

Does it count if I have a bird feeder with a movement detection camera that saves to the cloud 100's of terrible blurry images I look at once a never?

If you haven’t seen it, Listers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-wAqplQAo) provides a great glimpse into what competitive birdwatching looks like. It’s nothing like casual birdwatching.