Emily Alexandra Diamond’s favorite bird is the piping plover; David Thomas Meadows likes the Eastern phoebe.
But when it came down to it, they flocked together after meeting on Hinge in December 2023.
Ms. Diamond fell in love with birding in a high school ornithology class during her senior year at Phillips Exeter Academy; Mr. Meadows got hooked while on a fishing trip in Louisiana in fall 2022 with his brother, Ben.
“We didn’t catch any fish, but there were countless birds on the bayou,” said Mr. Meadows, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala. He zoomed in on ducks, geese, pelicans and egrets with his brother’s powerful Canon 800 millimeter camera.
“Bird after bird after bird,” said Ms. Diamond, to her delight, appeared on the Instagram account linked to his Hinge profile — just as she was considering taking a break from online dating.
“This guy is pretty handsome,” she also recalled thinking. It didn’t hurt that he was 6-foot-2 and she was 6 feet tall.
Mr. Meadows, 34, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and Spanish from Samford University in Homewood, Ala. He is a software developer at Stainless, a technology start-up company.
“Obviously, she was delightfully beautiful,” Mr. Meadows said, and “very much her own person in a lovely way,” judging from her profile videos, including a run in Mexico City and another showing off vinyl records in her apartment.
Ms. Diamond, 37, who grew up in Vineyard Haven, Mass., graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Bard College. She is a senior product manager on the experimentation technology team at Disney Streaming in New York.
As they messaged, she mentioned she was wearing a forest green sweatshirt from the McGolrick Bird Club, based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Soon, a date took flight.
That Friday evening, just before Christmas, she walked into Mr. Melo, a record bar in Williamsburg, wearing a red dress, black tights and an “elegant” black coat, he said. “She reminded me of one of the birds I wanted to see most — a vermilion flycatcher.”
Conversation easily flitted from birds to music to family. After two hours and only one cocktail, each admitted they seldom drank, and happily walked over to the Three Decker Diner in Greenpoint for tea.
“I was extremely impressed at how present he was,” she said, and charmed by his slight Southern accent sprinkled with “y’alls.”
As she spoke more deeply about family, he gently held her hand.
“Neither of us are night owls,” he said, and around 11 p.m., after three or four mugs of peppermint tea, they called it a night. Like many birders, they were early risers, who often caught the “dawn chorus” at parks around New York City.
Outside the diner, before she walked home to her apartment in the neighborhood and he took the subway to the West Village in Manhattan, a misinterpreted, comical hug led to a real first kiss.
Mr. Meadows, eager to squeeze in another date before a flight on Sunday to visit his family for Christmas in Birmingham, was glad to get her text first thing the next morning.
“I’m not shy,” she said, with a laugh.
On Sunday, at 8 a.m., both bundled up — she in her signature electric red gloves — they went birding around the Central Park Reservoir. They spotted all sorts of weird ducks, she with her Nikon Prostaff P3 and he with an old green pair of Athlon binoculars, slipping in the occasional kiss.
Afterward, they warmed up with coffee nearby. Cutting it close, he then booked an Uber home to grab a suitcase before heading to LaGuardia Airport.
During his two weeks away, they texted every day, played Wingspan, a video game where players attract birds to different habitats, and spent an hour on FaceTime birding together — he at the Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge in Decatur, Ala., and she in McGolrick Park.
“I was looking at pigeons and house sparrows,” Ms. Diamond said. “He was looking at the majesty of nature,” including thousands of sandhill cranes foraging in the fields, and Reba, a single white whooping crane and local celebrity.
As soon as Mr. Meadows returned to New York, they spent the weekend together, which included a friend’s birthday party and dinner at TLK, a now-closed gluten-free restaurant in the East Village. (They had already bonded over being gluten sensitive).
On Saturday, along Brooklyn Bridge Park, they sighted black ducks, gadwalls and cormorants, and she opened up about her egg retrieval procedure scheduled for the next day. (She said she “wanted to ease some of the pressure I was feeling about my timeline to conceive.”)
“He was really very David about it,” Ms. Diamond said. “Very curious. Very supportive. Just fantastic.”
After that, they regularly birded while running three or four times a week — along the Brooklyn side of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, where a pair of mockingbirds always showed up singing crazily or fighting; and along the West Side Highway, they had a rare sighting of a pair of purple sandpipers, thanks to the New York Rare Bird Alert.
They also went on a date to the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they tried to find ancient birds, like falcons or storks, amid Egyptian miniatures (they found vultures, storks, pelicans, falcons and hawks).
In February, during a hike in two feet of snow along the Appalachian Trail in Cat Rocks near Pawling, N.Y., a flock of golden-crowned kinglets serenaded them when they stopped under the evergreens for a quick snack.
For Valentine’s Day, after dinner at Cosme, a Mexican restaurant in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, birds even made it into a song she wrote for him and sang while playing her electric Framus guitar, on the couch next to Wallace, her scruffy terrier mutt.
“I always refer to birds in a song,” she said.
In March 2024, they broke up for about a week before he left on a two-week fishing trip.
“We weren’t sure we were on the same page about the future,” she said. But in the end, “we talked about it, and were really aligned on our values.”
Soon after their first sighting of an Eastern phoebe in McGolrick Park, a sign of spring, they celebrated with dinner out at a restaurant, which became a tradition.
Mr. Meadows moved into Ms. Diamond’s apartment in February 2025, and the next month they decided to have engagement rings made by fellow birders Parsley Steinweiss and Sue Kovach.
On June 7, 2025, while hiking the Appalachian Trail in the rain outside Pawling, where they saw 41 species, including an indigo bunting that interrupted Mr. Meadows’s proposal just before he got on one knee — and then serenaded them throughout the rest of the proposal.
The next day, she got down on one knee at Kingsland Wildflowers rooftop garden in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, followed by a walk to the Kosciuszko Bridge, where they saw osprey and chimney swifts.
On Jan. 17, Luis Mercedes Winter, Ms. Diamond’s best friend from high school and college, who received a one-day officiant license in New York City, led a ceremony before 91 guests at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn.
Their favorite birds subtly appeared on her veil as she walked down the aisle in an ivory A-line silk gown by Sarah Seven, made in New York, and later she changed into a column bias-cut silk gown by Alexandra Grecco.
Mr. Meadows, wearing a brown wool Todd Snyder suit, read the first four lines of the Emily Dickinson poem, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” and she read from the love notes she wrote over the relationship on various bird notecards.
Ms. Steinweiss, their fellow birder, then read the 11 species on the couple’s first checklist of birds they saw that day in Central Park, including buffleheads, hooded mergansers and red-tailed hawks.
To date, their life list includes 719 species across 940 checklists, and counting.
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On This Day
When: Jan. 17, 2026
Where: Wythe Hotel, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Buffleheads, Cormorants and Gulls, Oh My: On an early morning run from the Wythe Hotel to the Greenpoint Ferry, the couple saw four buffleheads, a dozen cormorants and at least 50 gulls along the waterfront. “Best of all, we got to spend 30 minutes together before the rush of the day,” Mr. Meadows said.
Beak to Beak Down the Aisle: Stitched on the bride’s veil were their favorite birds — the piping plover and the Eastern phoebe — lovingly faced each other, perched on silvery sweeping branches. The embroidery was done by Megan Thompson Brown, a maker at Kettle and Cloth in Nashville and the groom’s college friend.
She Took Flight on the Dance Floor: On cue during their first dance to “This Must Be the Place” by Talking Heads, Mr. Meadows lifted Ms. Diamond as the first verse began, “Home is where I want to be, pick me up and turn me ’round.” “The lift felt so exhilarating,” she said. “He spun me around a few times and I had my arms over my head.” A moment later, friends joined them.
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