Birdwatching
Most birdwatchers pursue this activity for recreational or social reasons, unlike ornithologists, who engage in the study of birds using formal scientific methods.
The term birding was also used for the practice of fowling or hunting with firearms as in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602): "She laments sir... her husband goes this morning a-birding.
Generally, self-described birders perceive themselves to be more versed in minutiae such as identification (aural and visual), molt, distribution, migration timing, and habitat usage.
The term twitcher, sometimes misapplied as a synonym for birder, is reserved for those who travel long distances to see a rare bird that would then be ticked, or counted on a list.
The most popular twitches in the UK have drawn large crowds; for example, approximately 2,500 people travelled to Kent, to view a golden-winged warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera), which is native to North America.
The early interest in observing birds for their aesthetic rather than utilitarian (mainly food) value is traced to the late 18th century in the works of Gilbert White, Thomas Bewick, George Montagu and John Clare.
[9] The study of birds, and of natural history in general, became increasingly prevalent in Britain during the Victorian Era, often associated with collection, eggs and later skins being the artifacts of interest.
[12] Birding in North America was focused in the early and mid-20th century in the eastern seaboard region, and was influenced by the works of Ludlow Griscom and later Roger Tory Peterson.
[20] Travelling far away also led to problems in name usage: British birds such as "wheatear", "heron" and "swallow" needed adjectives to differentiate them in places where there were several related species.
[21] The falling cost of air travel made flying to remote birding destinations a possibility for a large number of people towards the 1980s.
Since the second half of the 20th century an increasing number of people in developing countries have engaged in this activity, such as in the Degua Tembien district of Ethiopia.
Binoculars, an essential piece of birding equipment, became more easily available after World War II, making the hobby more accessible.
Kuşcenneti National Park (KNP) at Lake Manyas, a Ramsar site in Turkey, was estimated to attract birders who spent as much as US$103,320,074 annually.
[32] One of the expectations of ecotourism is that the travels of birders to a place will contribute to the improvement of the local economy, ensuring that the environment is valued and protected.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology hosts many citizen-science projects to track the number and distribution of bird species across North America.
Many countries and smaller regions (states/provinces) have "rarities committees" to check, accept or reject reports of rare birds made by birders.
Recent developments in audio technology have seen recording and reproduction devices shrink in both size and price, making them accessible to a greater portion of the birding community.
The non-linear nature of digital audio technology has also made selecting and accessing the required recordings much more flexible than tape-based models.
As the technology continues to improve, researchers and hobby birders have started using convolutional neural networks to mine sound recordings to identify and track specific bird calls.
The ability to capture and reproduce not only the visual characteristics of a bird, but also its patterns of movement and its sound, has wide applications for birders in the field.
This class of product includes devices that can play (and in some cases record) a range of digital media, typically video, audio and still image files.
New technologies are allowing birdwatching activities to take place over the Internet, using robotic camera installations and mobile phones set up in remote wildlife areas.
[49] With the advent of the World Wide Web, birders have been using the Internet to convey information; this can be via mailing lists, forums, bulletin-boards, web-based databases and other social media.
Messages can range from the serious to trivial, notifying others of rarities, questioning the taxonomy or identification of a species, discussing field guides and other resources, asking for advice and guidance, or organizing groups to help save habitats.
[52][53] One of the oldest, Birdchat[54] (based in the US), probably has the most subscribers, followed by the English-language fork of Eurobirdnet,[55] Birding-Aus[56] from Australia, SABirdnet[57] from South Africa and Orientalbirding.
[65] The lack of definite evidence, except arguably in the form of photographs, makes birding records difficult to prove but birdwatchers strive to build trust in their identification.
[67] There have been suggestions that identification of birds may be a form of gaining status which has been compared with Kula valuables noted in Papua New Guinean cultures.
Phoebe Snetsinger spent her family inheritance travelling to various parts of the world while suffering from a malignant melanoma, surviving an attack and rape in New Guinea before dying in a road accident in Madagascar.
[85] In 2008, two British birders, Alan Davies and Ruth Miller, gave up their jobs, sold their home and put everything they owned into a year-long global birdwatching adventure about which they a wrote a book called The Biggest Twitch.
[88] In early February 2024, Peter Kaestner became the first birder to log over 10,000 species, a record surrounded by much controversy as he was initially claimed to be beaten by Jason Mann who later conceded defeat.
