Mary Berg, author and host of CTV’s The Good Stuff.Illustration by The Globe and Mail/Kyla Zanardi/
MasterChef Canada winner turned TV host and cookbook author Mary Berg obviously loves cooking, but when the down-to-earth kitchen queen isn’t whipping up pot roasts or peanut butter cakes for the masses, what does she do to slow down and feed her soul?
Turns out, birdwatching has won the heart of the 36-year-old Torontonian, who finds joy by looking up to the skies for the cardinals, blue jays, robins and chickadees that (literally) call to her.
In this instalment of Joy Diaries, the host of CTV’s The Good Stuff, and a bestselling author whose fourth cookbook, Mary’s Comfort Classics, will be on shelves in November, explains how a pandemic hobby gave way to lasting inspiration.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been really into birds. Not pet birds in the house, but looking at birds in the sky. There’s just something about the freedom of a bird that’s really calming to me. It’s hard to say why, but even on my worst days, seeing or hearing a bird makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay.
I know it’s an online joke that you turn 30 and you’re suddenly into birds, but that’s kind of exactly what happened to me. I never considered myself an actual birdwatcher until the pandemic, which was obviously a horrible time, but also an interesting time that made you stop and look at the world around you.
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Since I was doing little mental health walks every day, I got myself a pair of good binoculars and some light birdwatching gear. I ordered some books, like National Geographic’s Field Guide, for my collection. I found myself wearing a lot of t-shirts with birds on them. Birds were like my new personality.
I’m usually a Type A person and an anxious sort who walks really fast, so this is my version of stopping to smell the roses. Provided I slow down and look around, there are tons of birds in my area of the city. One of my local favourites is the belted kingfisher, with its big crazy beak. They’re hard to spot because they’re really fast, but I was out kayaking the other day and saw a pair of them – a male and a female. It was the best day ever.
My absolute favourite bird is the puffin, which I’d never seen in the wild until last year when I was in Ireland. Obviously I’d brought my travel binoculars with me, and while everyone else was looking at the Cliffs of Moher, I was looking the other way for puffins. It was so exciting to spot them nesting and add the puffin to my list. I’d really love to see a great horned or barred owl, or a saw-whet would be amazing too. I saw a snowy owl down on Ontario Place once! It was an absolute thrill.
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I have an app called Merlin from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which is basically Shazam for birds, where you record the bird you hear and it tells you what kind of bird you’re hearing. I’m getting pretty good now at recognizing birds by their sounds and not just their looks. I saw the new Spider-Man in the theatre recently and there was a scene with birds chirping in the background so I leaned over to my friend and whispered, “That’s a cardinal!”
We sometimes use outside B-roll footage with birds during my cooking show, and the sound engineer sends me stills to make sure the bird we’re showing matches the bird call we’re playing. Mis-matches happen a lot on television and it bugs birders like me. Now I really appreciate the right bird call when I see one.
I honestly could talk about birds forever; that’s how much joy they bring me. I love knowing they’re there whenever I need them. Sometimes you’re looking at a tree and you think you just see leaves. Then as soon as you look closer, you can pick out a bird, and then you’ll see a whole bunch of birds. You just needed to switch your perspective.
As told to Rosemary Counter