Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline

I believe that we'll see a lot of "x is good for your brain" news (with X just being any activity that doesn't involve a screen), now that attention spans are so short and everyone feels like their brain isn't the same anymore. The same way we got gyms when people realized physical inactivity is super unhealthy.

Just a bit of anecdata (observer bias). A lot of, "birdwatchers" I see travelling to remote parts of Scotland and other places in the UK are generally wealthy retirees, with nice kit (Rab clothing, telephoto lenses, VW campervans). Cognitive decline is shown to impact disproportionately on less wealthy people. So is there a trend with economic wealth and outdoor hobbies like birdwatching? I'd hazard a yes. On a side note, the Merlin bird ID app from Cornell University is great.

Sounds to me that nature (and the animals) is the thing that slows cognitive decline and so on and so forth. Not birdwatching per se. (I didn't read the article, but having studied psychology, I am assuming with confidence that there is a confounding factor that makes it look like birdwatching is the _thing_ that slows cognitive decline.)

If you haven’t seen it, Listers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-wAqplQAo) provides a great glimpse into what competitive birdwatching looks like. It’s nothing like casual birdwatching.

Does it count if I have a bird feeder with a movement detection camera that saves to the cloud 100's of terrible blurry images I look at once a never?