Birding is a heightened state with a strange loss of self. Once you start, it’s hard to stop

Australian pelicans, Pelecanus conspicillatus. ‘Above a busy Caulfield crossroad I once saw five pelicans slowly revolve in a circle, floating on the summer thermal currents.’ Photograph: Auscape/UIG/Getty Images

When I started birding, it was daggy – that was precisely why I wanted to learn more. I wanted to do something so niche, so consuming, I could lose myself in it. I was in a funk that needed urgent lifting.

It started as a distraction. I was battling addiction and mental illness, spending so long in clinics and therapists’ rooms my vitamin D count had bottomed out.