As a semi-avid birder, I believe that birds can bring people together across lines of political contestation. This paper uses combination of personal experience and research from a variety of documents, books, and newspapers to examine how even a seemingly apolitical endeavor is shaped by the ongoing political conflict in between Israelis and Palestinians. Like so many other efforts in the region, people of goodwill insist that their efforts build bridges between the peoples and political factions of the region. But for the last century or more, the politics of birding belies a simple ornithological assessment. In this paper I examine a variety of stories about birds and their political implications. One is the debate the raged in Israel in 2008 about which species to choose for the national bird. Should they pick the Palestine Sunbird, a creature which embodies the name of the people with whom they have an ongoing land dispute? Or the Hoopoe, which is one of few birds deemed non-Kosher in the Torah? Or should it be a local nightingale called the Bulbul, whose name doubles as slang for male genitalia? While the 150,000 Israelis who voted ultimately chose the hoopoe, angering the Hasidic community, I dig beyond this contemporary story to examine the politics of naming birds, including efforts to rename the Palestine Sunbird. While living in Jerusalem I visited both the Israeli Jerusalem Bird Observatory and the Palestinian Wildlife Society, organizations that claim to work together at times, but whose relationship is clearly defined by their national conflict as well. The funding, prestige, and opportunities at each are also determined by funding differentials. I also assess more recent stories about migratory hawks shot down by Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon who were convinced that the Israelis were using the birds to spy on their locations. At other times birds, especially those fitted for scientific purposes with trackers, are simply mistaken for the very real drones used for such purposes. Shaul Cohen argues in “Environmentalism Deferred” (2011) that “environmentalism in Palestine/Israel operates within a context that is bounded by existential concerns, and, as such, it is subsumed by a metanarrative that makes it marginal in impact and, in many respects, irrelevant in the context of discourses of land, resources, and power.” What’s true for environmentalism is equally true for its parts, of which bird conservation and ornithological concerns are an important one in the region.