In my family, vacations had only two rules: first, every available minute of every day had to be spent in the car, moving; second, never turn back, and never stop. No matter what.

As long as I can remember, Dad’s motto has been, if you can’t see it at 65 miles per hour, it probably isn’t worth seeing to begin with.

Each morning, in the pitch dark, he’d wake us with his favorite John Wayne quote, yelling, "You’re burning daylight," and while my brother and sisters and I stumbled, wondering exactly where all this daylight was, Dad was mapping out our day of running like fugitives.

But there was always one simple compensation: although my father would never, ever stop, he made up for it by having the sharpest eyes this planet has known. Driving across the country each summer, we missed nothing. Well, okay, so he had an utter inability to see rest stops and roadside attractions, but it seemed like my father could spot a deer hiding behind a cement wall, a snake five feet down in its burrow, his eyes were so good. Superman would have wept with envy to have eyes like my father’s.

And what Dad liked to see the most were birds. There was no need to stop—you could enjoy the wild without taking your hands from the steering wheel. Through the windows of our old blue Plymouth Fury, he’d point out hawks on the wing, kingfishers in thick brush waiting to dive, the angled line of fulmars somehow staying aloft in hurricane winds. He knew gull species by the shapes of their beating wings, and he could tell a three-toed woodpecker from a black-backed woodpecker—two species that are almost identical in flight—at a thousand yards.

I was raised to be a roadside birder.

The Audubon Society says that over 70 million Americans participate in birding—from the hardcore birders with their spotting scopes the size of baseball bats, to the people who just like to put out a birdfeeder and watch the chickadees come.

Audubon might not recognize roadside birding as a distinct subcategory, but it’s one with infinite richness and possibility. The roadside birder is simply out to make the driving experience better, putting a name to what flies past. This is what my father taught me: It’s utterly amazing how much you can see from the comfort of your own car, how much is out there right next to the road. All you have to do is look.

And luckily for us, Arizona is about the best place in the country to be a roadside birder. The state has ridiculously rich birdlife: 414 documented species, plus another fifty or so that appear as quirks of fate or weather. I’ve seen pelicans over Old Scottsdale. I’ve had ravens fly loops down the road in front of me, been attacked by owls at highway rest stops, and seen Bald eagles perched on fence posts. I once had a Cooper’s hawk swoop next to my car in Papago Park, grab a ground squirrel, and accelerate back into the sky so fast that it zipped past my speeding Toyota like I was parked. Arizona has more hummingbirds than anybody, period. We’ve also got an odd number of water species, my personal favorites: coots and White-faced ibis, Tundra swans and Blue-winged teals, and dozens more. Thanks to the proliferation of golf courses, Arizona might have more Canada geese than Canada at this point.

I’ve traveled with the serious birders—stood by while they leaped up and down with joy because some bird was a hundred miles south of where it should have been. I’ve watched them whistle their birdcalls at trees and wait, with infinite patience, for an answer. I once spent a week on a boat in the Aleutians with fifty people desperate to see a whiskered auklet. But I have to admit it: the details boggle me. If I’d ever been inclined to be a serious birder, the kind who knows migration routes and tertial or greater covert colors, my desires were cut short when I found out that the only thing separating a whiskered auklet from a crested auklet is one feather that is only noticeable when the bird is dry.

Auklets are never dry. That’s why they live in the ocean. Because they don’t want to be dry.

So much for being a serious birder.

Happily, I’ve got roadside birding to fall back on. Roadside birding has all of the fun of serious birding, all the rewards, all the challenge, and none of the standing in a thorn bush at five in the morning trying to hide from a vireo or Pygmy nuthatch that would fit in a tea cup and still have room left over.

You can work out your own way to do this, but my personal roadside birding rules are simple. Birding while the car is still moving—the faster the better—is the ideal of course, but unlike my father, I’ll stop from time to time and allow a hundred yards or so from parking spaces as legitimate birding territory. Binoculars are okay, but not if they cost more than you car did. Yes, I’ve looked through incredible binocs, but somehow, the thought of a couple thousand dollars worth of glass hanging around my neck stops me cold.

Because you’re never going to get very far from the vehicle, you can use the heaviest bird identification guide you can find. I like the quite hefty Sibley’s Guide to Birds, which not only has good illustrations of plumage variations through the year, but more importantly has flight profiles, essential for a good roadside birder—a lot of the birds you see are going to be on the wing, and it’s essential to know the difference between the profile of, say, a swift as opposed to a swallow. The smaller Audubon and Kaufman guides, which have easier-to-use layouts, are good for back-up, and they make spotting color variations quick and easy. However, they’re more for people who deeply, truly care which of the 37 species of sparrows they’re looking at. The roadside birder should always be willing to let fine details slide in favor of the larger project. Be happy you’re catching sparrows in mid-flight, but worry about whether they’re Fox, Lincoln, Song, or White-crowned some day when you’re home sick and there’s nothing to watch on TV.

It is a little difficult at first learning what to look for, but with only a little practice, the birds start to make sense. You’re looking for silhouettes and patterns, quickly recognized signatures in flight or perching behavior. In other words, you’re looking for the easy stuff.

Roadside birding isn’t really about fine details; no way can you tell the difference between a Costa’s hummingbird and a Black-chinned—both are fairly common in southern Arizona, with the Black-chinned showing up throughout the state—at highway speeds. Better to notice "hummingbird," to notice the flash of the green back and the iridescent purple chins that set these two apart from the red-chinned Anna’s hummingbird that hangs out in much the same territory.

Of course, the bigger the bird, the easier it gets, and again, Arizona is the place to be. Just a couple quick examples. In the deserts, the showman is the Turkey vulture, with wings spanning five feet, and that ability to fly for hours without ever seeming to twitch a feather. When the Boyce Thompson Arboretum has its annual hello and goodbye parties for the vultures, you might see hundreds in a huge, swirling kettle, looking for the perfect thermal. South of Tucson, there’s always a chance of seeing the even bigger Black vulture; distinguish the two by the Turkey vulture’s red head, the Black vulture’s wings that are only white on the tips, instead of all the way along the back edge, like the turkey vulture.

Smaller and faster are the hawks: Red tails have—just like you’d expect—a red tail that shows up from a mile away when it glints in the light. Sharp-shinned hawks have sharper tails, and a Cooper’s hawk looks like a red tail, but without the red tail.

The true beauty of being a roadside birder is that you can do it any time, anywhere. When you’re stopped at a red light, why read the bumper stickers on the car ahead of you when you can be watching house finches pick at grass seed in front of a fast-food restaurant?

But that said, of course, some places offer more possibility than others. And so where should you go in this paradise of the roadside birder? What’s out there to see besides that symbol of the state, the roadrunner? In the Phoenix metro area alone, the Scottsdale greenbelt has Black-crowned night herons, Green herons, migrating Sandhill cranes, gadwalls, coots, and probably a dozen species of duck. Go a little further afield to where the Gila River turns into a wide, slow marsh near Firebird Raceway, and you’ll find flocks of Snowy and Great egrets, impossibly white against the blue sky and gray mountains, flying by. The same marsh has ospreys, Double-crested cormorants, Black-bellied whistling ducks. Great blue herons—which you can find near almost any body of water in Arizona—fold their necks into origami shapes. The fields nearby have phoebes, juncos, Chipping sparrows, killdeer, snipes, and Gila woodpeckers. On a single day here one winter, we counted upwards of eighty species.

Golf courses and parks anywhere in the state are good places to look. The abundant water and grass bring birds in like they were magnetized. From the common—moorhens and American avocets, which look like penguins that got carried away in the leg and beak department—to the much more rare, such as the Black-legged kittiwake, usually found only in oceans, they’re all there.

The Tucson Audbon Society makes roadside birding easy in their book Finding Birds in Southeast Arizona. "Accessibility: Most roads in the Forest can be birded from a car." Drive-through birding, as it were, in the Chiricahuas, where you can see creepers—they only climb up trees, never down—chickadees, nuthatches, kinglets, and other small birds you might miss at full highway speed, but they’re perfect for the pace of a side road. Near Kitt Peak—again, without bothering to get out of the car—they suggest you watch for the broad, square wings of Golden eagles, for Rock wrens, Canyon wrens. No real need to slow down for those.

If you’re in southern Arizona and feeling a little sybaritic, hang out in Madera Canyon, south of Tucson. This is a crossing point for Arizona species and Mexican birds that come up over the summer. Most famous are the hummingbirds that hang out at the feeders in front of the Santa Rita Lodge Nature Resort. Despite their small size, an hour or so of watching hummingbirds will convince you of one thing: these are mean, nasty little birds. They spend more time fighting each other off than they do actually sucking nectar from the feeders.

Still in southern Arizona, if you’re a waterbird fan like I am, you can’t miss Patagonia Lake State Park. In winter, this is the place to be if you’ve got webbed feet: Neotropical cormorants whose long black necks make them look like giraffes on the wing, mergansers, grebes, and enough species of duck that after a while you’ll just put the bird book down and be happy watching them swim around, like flying toasters on a computer screen saver. The past couple of winters, there’s been an Elegant trogon—red belly, green wings, and much more at home further south in Mexico—hanging out here.

If you’re in the northern end of the state, don’t despair: there’s still plenty of roadside birding pleasure. The Mogollon Rim has Great horned owls and Flammulated owls—no, I don’t know what "flammulated" means, either. Leave it for the specialists. For us, it’s enough to know that their wings look longer and more pointed than most owls.

Around Williams, or driving between Heber and Holbrook, watch for Bald eagles—the famed white head on the adults, or the brown, mottled bodies of the juveniles. Bald eagles winter at Coleman Lake, just outside Williams, and it’s not a bad place to see turkeys, low on the ground and looking like seriously wild feather dusters. Turkeys can fly, but they’re not all that big on the idea, so you have to watch for them the way you’d watch for javalina or coyotes: brown shapes moving against the forest backdrop. Wild toms are big enough to stare straight into the windows of a jacked-up SUV.

All along the Colorado River, you’re in owl and hawk paradise, a land full of small, furry animals to swoop. From roads around Kingman, you might see Great horned, Spotted, Western, and Screech owls—even that Flammulated owl, doing whatever it is flammulating requires. Golden eagles and Ferruginous hawks catch thermals over the river. By Parker, drive through the Bill Williams Delta Wildlife Refuge for Snow geese, which look like patches of fog flying by. There are more egrets than you’d think Arizona could hold, and White pelicans—that you absolutely know have to be lost beyond all hope—stand around, chins hanging like crepe paper streamers.

At the north rim of the Grand Canyon, check the brush for Blue grouse, the tall sides of trees for Williamson’s sapsucker. Prairie falcons dive for squirrels—maybe even for those long-eared Kaibab squirrels, which don’t hang out anywhere else. Hey, just because you’re looking at birds, it’s no excuse to be ignoring everything else.

Because in the end, here’s the true lesson and delight of the roadside birder, those who count their travels not in miles per gallon, but in birds per mile. All that the world requires of you is attention, and it will in turn reward you with infinite, glorious variety.

So what if my father never once let us stop so we could buy genuine beaded moccasins, or fake alligator-skin wallets. Doesn’t matter so much. Instead, he taught us this: get out there and open your eyes. You’re burning daylight.