What a weird coincidence. I currently live in the city, where there is a stark absence of birds -- besides maybe coronavirus pigeons and gulls that will mug you down a dark alley -- but I'm from and work in the countryside, where I've established an acute awareness of the local bird life. I particularly like listening to bird song; I find it very relaxing. As recently as last week, I was thinking about compiling an Anki deck to help me learn to identify birds by sight and by their song. However, I was discouraged not so much by the quantity, but the subtleties in the differences (e.g., the aforementioned pigeons vs. wood pigeons: one has black stripes on their wing tips, but I don't remember which)... Seeing this, this morning on HN, re-encourages me to pursue ornithology as a hobby :)
No citation handy, but I came across a theory that the high levels of anxiety and stress and malaise prevalent in modern urban society is caused in part by the absence of birdsong. Consider our savannah ancestors, for whom the ambient sounds of birds constituted an "all is well" signal; cries of alarm and sudden flight served as an early warning system, and their silence could signal presence of a predator or other threat. It seems plausible to me that city-dwellers, at a primal level, "miss" these sounds in whose presence our systems of perception evolved, resulting in an imbalance and heightened baseline fear and anxiety.
Related tangent: "forest bathing" is a noteworthy remedy.
Keep your eyes open and I think you'll find there are far more kinds of birds in the city than one might first think. Once you get into the habit it can be very rewarding!
Cities tend to have a concentration effect on birds, especially during migrations. Central Park in NYC, for instance, is one of the best places in the world for birdwatching in spring and fall. Birds migrate at night, and at first light, gravitate to the first tree they can find. Since NYC is concrete for miles and miles, a very wide area's worth of birds all funnel into Central Park (and other parks, of course) and you get amazing quantities and varieties. The same is true for parks in other cities.
So don't worry about groups of species (like gulls or pigeons) and just learn to recognize them as a pigeon or gull. UNLESS you happen to see a lot of different kinds of those species.
You'll probably find a lot of house sparrows in your city... little brown birds. The males have a black bib. If you can find any sort of park in your city with trees or water, then you should be able to find a lot more birds. Water is also great for ducks.
