Birding in Pope Lick Park

Sometimes a game’s title tells you exactly what you’re going to get. And so it is in this choice-based nature simulator, as you take a gentle stroll through nature to look for noteworthy avians while your tongue gently caresses Leo the Great.

If I wasn’t out of the Church before, that gag would earn an excommunication – sorry not sorry, as the kids say. No, as best I can tell from a bit of wiki-diving, the place got its name because some guy in Louisville named Pope had some salt licks on his riverside property. What the park loses in nominative exoticism it gains in natural beauty, at least according to the copious pictures (the author’s own) illustrating the game. It’s nothing fancy – there’s a bridge, some water, soccer fields, paths, grass, and trees – but I found it a pleasant place to make a virtual visit, especially since I’ve been living under a 105-degree heat dome for the past week. Oh, and there are birds, which are the whole point of the exercise!

The protagonist isn’t characterized by anything other than their love of birdwatching, which means the game presupposes that when you wander the park, you won’t want to spend time striking up conversations or kicking a ball around or getting exercise, and instead will have eyes and ears alert for feathered friends. I confess that this isn’t a hobby that’s ever appealed to me, but the author does a good job articulating why one might enjoy it. In each location you visit, you’ll get a sprinkling of flavor text setting the scene, an attractive photo (with thoughtfully-provided alt text), and a prompt to look closer and possibly spot a new bird. If you do, you’re rewarded with another nice pic of the avian in question, and a compact description of what’s uniquely interesting about this one in particular. Here’s one I liked:

"Looking through your binoculars, maybe 50 feet away you spot a bird walking head-first down a tree trunk…. A White-breasted Nuthatch. You love these goofy birds. You listen closely and hear the quiet “ha ha” sound it makes as it searches for bugs living in the bark. It flies from tree to tree, sometimes going up, sometimes upside down on the bottom of a horizontal branch."

And that’s it, that’s the game. You’re using a birding app – the game provides an external link to it if you’d like to download it yourself – which allows you to track what you’ve seen, and the game provides a quick summary once you decide you’ve had enough and leave the park, but there’s no checklist, no goals beyond the intrinsic ones of enjoying a walk and looking at as many different birds as you can find. There are a whole lot of them, from swallows to hawks to cardinals to vultures, and even as a layman I was impressed by the variety. The game’s also designed to be non-deterministic; sometimes you’ll revisit an area you’d been to previously and see that some new birds have taken up residence, which makes things feel less like an exercise in lawn-mowering. The often-confusing layout of the park also reduces any perceived gaminess – I found it hard to keep track of where I’d already been, and how different paths connected, which was frustrating at first but eventually I unclenched my jaw and just went with the flow.

So yeah, there’s nothing here that isn’t said on the tin. And unfortunately this isn’t a game that plays nicely on mobile – the bird pictures displayed for me at a super high resolution that drastically reduced the zoom and somehow blanked out most of the links. But if you’re at all interested in what birders see in their objects of obsession, you could do a lot worse than spending a few minutes with this grounded, low-key experience.