Recently, though, Thorp’s art has been all about birds. Like many people, he became an avid birder during the COVID lockdown. Even living in Brooklyn, N.Y., “there’s not really a moment where you cannot find a bird,” he says. For this issue’s feature story about hybrid chickadees by writer Rebecca Heisman, Thorp mapped the hybrids’ shifting range. He sees these two loves—of birding and of data—as fundamentally linked; he now teaches a course on them and is writing a book called We Were Out Counting Birds. “Birders are fundamentally data collectors,” he says. Even those who don’t add their observations to community science repositories are still keen observers of behavioral data. Birding, he says, “helps you learn how to notice” the natural world.