A STATISTIC-collecting group, Statista (statista.com), conducted an online survey over a 14-year period (2006-20) about birdwatching. The survey had 18,000 respondents of people over 6 years old who traveled more than a quarter mile from home to watch birds (hopefully the 6-year-olds were with a birdwatching adult). In just one of those years — 2019 to 2020— the extrapolated statistic went from 12.82 million to 15.23 million, the most ever.
If you count those who just watch birds outside the windows of their home, the number is tens of millions higher than that. Birdwatching boomed during the pandemic lockdown period, which happened to coincide (spring 2020 in case you have forgotten!) with spring migration.
Audubon notes that their website traffic during this period spiked 23%. The American Birding Association says downloads of their podcast went from 5,000 per week in February 2020 to 8,000 per week in May 2020. People in every corner of the country seemed to suddenly realize that birdwatching can happen from almost any window almost anywhere.
An article on the AARP website makes the point that this newfound hobby/interest of millions of Americans was “once scorned as a nerdy pastime of list-keepers and early risers.” We longtime bird nerds knew we were on to something all along!
Facebook users likely saw it happening with their friends. If you can’t go anywhere and post pictures of your adventures, you post what is around you. And what is around you are birds.
What hopefully also comes of this is a greater appreciation and concern for the fact that a huge percentage of bird species have gone extinct in the past half century. Attributing factors are thought to include:
• Climate change, which seems to have also had a huge impact on migration changes including some birds coming farther north during breeding season and some birds staying farther north during non-breeding season.
• External factors such as outdoor cats, window strikes, and collisions with other structures. Tufts Wildlife Clinic says that “ornithologists estimate that up to 100 million birds are killed each year by collisions with windows.” See their site at wildlife.tufts.edu/bird-strikes-windows/ to learn how to help a bird that collides with a window at your home.
• Poisons such as secondary poisoning from rodenticides. If you follow local raptor/bird rehabilitators on Facebook or other social media, you will have read just in the past year about raptors and owls brought to them regularly who have been found ill and determined to have ingested rodents that were dead or dying from rodenticide poisoning. A snowy owl was brought in to On the Wing, rehabilitated and released as a success story, only to return having been re-poisoned. It miraculously recovered again thanks to On the Wing’s extraordinary efforts and, now late for the northern migration to breeding and feeding grounds, was given a lift farther north to get a leg up on its journey. We humans need to give up our addiction to poisons. Those bald eagles we now see almost daily? That is the result of banning DDT brought about by the alarm call in Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring.”
Birds at Hampton Beach
This bird nerd has started once again volunteering with the New Hampshire Fish and Game’s Nongame and Endangered Wildlife Program’s piping plover monitoring initiative at Hampton Beach State Park. Last Sunday morning I was treated to seeing four new hatchlings from one of the nests on the beach this year. Plovers scratch up a little sand and lay their eggs out in the open. Fish and Game ropes off areas where the nests are to alert beachgoers to their presence since they would be easy to accidentally walk on.
Once the eggs hatch, the chicks are off and running within hours. The first couple of weeks of life is when they are most vulnerable on the busy beach — only about the size of a golf ball, at that young age they can’t get out of the way quickly. Their instinct instead is to hunker down, which leaves them vulnerable to being stomped on. And they need to be able to move around the beach to the most protein-rich areas such as seaweed and the water’s edge. The more they eat, the faster they grow, the better they can protect themselves.
Also nesting on Hampton Beach and also an endangered species in New Hampshire are least terns, whose nests have nearly doubled in number this year. They are great birds to nest along with the plovers since the terns are quite defensive and will dive-bomb potential intruders, which by default also protects the plover nests which are typically in the same areas.
The chicks of these beautiful birds do not hatch out of their shell and start scurrying around like the plover; least tern parents bring small fish to their young and feed them in the nest. It’s a privilege to be part of helping these endangered birds nest on our short New Hampshire coast.
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Cheryl Kimball is a freelance writer who lives north of Rochester. Email her at naturetalksck@gmail.com.
