A male of the American high literati variety in its natural habitat.

Tuesday afternoon was a particularly outdoorsy one for The Observer. Donning binoculars, sneakers, sunscreen, and shorts, we set off to Central Park to get in touch with nature and to go bird watching. Among our avian sightings? A Red-tailed Hawk, a Black-crowned Night Heron, two Eastern King Birds, and a particularly interesting bespectacled male of the American high literati — Jonathan Franzen.

Mr. Franzen is to birding what David Byrne is to cycling. An up-and-coming spokesperson for the hobby, he was in Central Park to help launch the new HBO documentary, Birders: The Central Park Effect. Airing on July 16, the film follows seven urban birdwatchers as they literally schedule their lives around the rhythms of bird migration passing through New York. Unabashedly among them is Mr. Franzen.

If you're familiar with his writing you're well aware that we're talking about a serious birder here. After all, the protagonist of Freedom, his 2010 "masterpiece of American fiction," is a birder gone berserk who spends the novel fighting to establish a safe haven for Cerulean Blue Warblers in West Virginia. "With a name as beautiful and a bird as endangered as the Cerulean Blue Warbler," Mr. Franzen told The Observer, drawing out the syllables, "Well, how couldn't I use that bird for Freedom?"

Avian subject matter isn't just limited to Mr. Franzen's fiction. His most recent non-fiction collection, Farther Away, has four different essays that touch on his ornithological obsession. In one piece about a hardcore solitary birding exhibition in the South Pacific, he writes of his late best friend, David Foster Wallace: "I understood the difference between his unmanageable history and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not." (Birding as an antidote to the suffering of the twisted artist?)

But as into birding as Mr. Franzen is, he's not unaware that bird watching is considered pretty damn weird. "I think it's a really weird and uncool thing to be doing," he told The Observer. His friends even told him that birding was tantamount to social suicide. "They clutched their foreheads and said, 'Don't do that, it's so weird.' I walked through the park for first year or two with my binoculars hidden, discreetly bring them up when I saw something, and then quickly putting them down."

Soon, however, he got over the stigma. "A funny thing happened to me," he said. "Basically I fell in love with birds." And love soon turned into a sort of addiction. When he should have been writing in the mornings, finishing Freedom, he was in Central Park, bird spotting.

"Then there began to be diminishing returns," he told us. "When the deadlines for the novel had come and gone, I had to reprioritize. So, I started to use birding trips as imperatives, promising myself a great trip as soon as I was done with something." And as soon as he finished Freedom he was off — a seven-week birding trip to the Mediterranean. "I definitely pine for birds when I have been deprived of them for too long. And I think to have someone come out and speak to the weirdness and uncoolness of it, well, it's —."

But before he could continue, Starr Saphir, a veteran Central Park birding guide who was leading the HBO stroll, yelled, "Black-crowned Night Heron!"

Binoculars out, Mr. Franzen shut up. "Yep, there you go." Binoculars down. "Go ahead. You can even spot it with your naked eye." So, The Observer tried to find it. One minute. Two minutes. Two and a half. Mr. Franzen kept giving us directions, and eventually took us to the side and said, "I am determined to help you find this bird. You can do it." Three and a half minutes. Taking us by the shoulders, he then pivoted us forty-five degrees farther to the left. "It's right there. In front of you. 12 o'clock." We were starting to get really embarrassed until (finally!), there it was. The Night Heron!

Sympathetic, he reassured us with a smile, "It's okay. This is tricky at first."

Then it was on to more seeking and strolling. Mr. Franzen and a fellow birder got into a small tiff about the owl population on the north end of the East River. Two zany old hippies were too-loudly reminiscing about the days of nude sunbathing in Central Park. "There was a different kind of bird watching going on, if you know what I mean," one of them said. We think we heard Franzen giggle. Who knows, though — he might have just been happy to see a little cedar waxwing perched overhead. But before there were any words on the waxwing, a fancy birder in Prada and open-toed patent pumps broke the silence. "Shit! It just shat on me!"

Eyes rolled. What an amateur.

(Photos via Patrick McMullan)