All the Cool Kids Are Birding

Not long before the sun rose on a Saturday in May, five men in their mid-20s were standing alongside an unassuming wetland in New Jersey, searching for birds. Ryan Zucker, a 23-year-old who could do an impressive impersonation of an eastern screech owl, had just taken a small branch to the eye, but still the group was exuberant. Since midnight, they’d heard that owl, a common gallinule, and—after following some freight-rail tracks through the dark—the high-pitched, near-electronic trill of a…