Actor Lili Taylor is an avid birder, and she has written a book about her passion, Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing.
Show notes:
- Lili Taylor
- Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing
- Merlin Bird ID
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow
- How to Use Images in Your Scrivener Projects: Advanced Techniques for Ebooks (how to link to external images)
- Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
- Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing
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Actor Lili Taylor is an avid birder, and she has written a book about her passion, Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing, which was a New Yorker Best Book of 2025.
Lili discovered birds about 15 years ago, when she spent some time away from her Brooklyn home, in a house in Upstate New York on 100 acres of working farmland. She didn’t have a spark bird, “the bird that ignites that birding passion. I guess I had a spark moment, or a spark time, which was when I got quiet and started to hear birds in a way I hadn’t before.”
The subtitle of her book is The Power and Beauty of Noticing. When someone is in that quiet space, they start noticing things that are drowned out by the world around them. Lili said, “I did realize that it’s an inside job and you can cultivate that wherever you are. It’s possible to find serenity, and it’s possible to listen and pay attention wherever you are.”
Lili bridged the gap between her work as an actor and her birding passion. In the book, she says, “I’ve discovered that the most important skill I use in acting is also when I’m looking at birds. That skill is listening.” She said, “I think that for all of us, listening is something we need to use for ourselves, for life. I think that there’s something to be gained for everybody in learning how to listen better, whether it’s used primarily in your profession or not.”
I mentioned how I had discovered birds during the COVID lockdown, and how the Merlin Bird ID app showed me how many birds were around me. Lili said, “If you ever feel alone, put the Merlin ID app on and you will realize you are not alone. You’ve got friends out there.”
I asked if going between Brooklyn and the upstate farm was like going to see friends again. “It is like that. A red-winged blackbird just showed up today [in Brooklyn]. He was a month late. I was getting a little worried because usually they come in mid-February. [We recorded this podcast mid-March.] But finally, I heard him today, whereas I see them upstate.”
As an actor, Lili travels a lot. I asked how birding helped her deal with different locations and spending a lot of time in a trailer between takes. “I like to leave my trailer door open if I can, if the weather permits. There’s stuff going on, and I always have my binoculars. It’s a great way to get people talking about birds. It’s like a calling card to birds.”
In the book, Lili says the only thing you need to start paying attention to birds is a pair of binoculars and a smartphone. But “to begin birding, you don’t even need a pair of binoculars. You can just start anywhere, with your ears and your eyes. Maybe just start getting to know what’s in your neighborhood, what’s on your street, and see if that bird is still there the next day.”
Lili mentions the book Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is about the flow state we develop when focusing deeply on things. “Birds are just one way in. You can substitute it for whatever you want. What I’m talking about is having a love for something and getting into it.”
Lili has been writing for years, but had never tried to write a book before. Her manager introduced her to a literary agent, who said, “Why don’t you write me an email about a bird you’ve seen?” She did that, then sent a few more, wrote a proposal, and the book idea took form.
Lili had been using Scrivener for a while for other writing, including screenwriting, but it was the perfect fit for her first book. As a long-time techie, she leveraged other apps, such as Obsidian for recording notes, and Keyboard Maestro and Better Touch Tool for creating shortcuts, to help her work with Scrivener.
One way she does this is to mark bits of text in her Scrivener project that she may want to remove. “Graying out text that I might not use is better than striking through or deleting it. I do that with a very quick keyboard shortcut. Then, with Scrivener, I use find by formatting [to find colored text] in gray. I go through my whole document. Once I think I could let go of this gray text, I don’t think I’m going to use this anymore, I take all my gray text out, and I put it into a new document I call Gray.”
“I love that you can make all sorts of folders for research, for words, for things you’re thinking about. And then you can compile, you can use note cards. I’ve used it for scripts. I use Final Draft, but I like to use Scrivener because Scrivener can help me do things Final Draft can’t.”
I asked Lili why she’s so attracted to tech and whether it compensated for the exteriorization of being an actor. She said, “I love tech. I love apps. I love all this stuff. And learning curves don’t scare me. There’s always going to be something to figure out. You’re going to get through a lot of things, and then you’re going to have something really cool.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.