Five years ago, at Christmastime, I was lucky enough to see two snowy owls in the wild. This was no surprise encounter or anything—I went actively looking for them. I had just gotten a decent camera for Christmas, and I had seen on eBird that there were a few snowy owls wintering at Jones Beach, not far from my parent’s home. Jones Beach is a big place, but the owls were not hard to track down on account of the crowd of people with cameras in the distance giving their location away. It was an awesome experience and remains one of the coolest wildlife encounters of my life.
Despite all of this, I feel a little bad about the whole thing in retrospect. I did not knowingly give either of these owls a hard time, of course. I felt that I maintained a respectable distance of about the required 100 feet. However, one of the owls I found was sitting right on the beach, and onlookers, while technically maintaining a respectable distance from the owl, formed an inescapable radius it, which cannot have been comfortable for the bird.
This happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was taking an ornithology course as an undergraduate at the time, and when we transitioned to online school, our homework became to go out and find birds ourselves in place of planned group outings. This was how I fell in with the masses who took up birding during lockdown. Birding was very valuable to me during this period, as it was one of the few things that kept me outside and active. I found comfort in the way nature carried on, ignorant of the events that had brought human activity to a standstill. In birding I found a hobby that I still enjoy today, and that I regularly meet new people through. It is a wonderful thing that so many people discovered an enriching new hobby during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the influx of people flocking to their local parks and other natural areas raised new concerns about how even the most well-intentioned people can commodify and ultimately harm the natural world they seek to admire and protect.
Owls, like the pair of snowy owls I admired on the beach, have become the poster child for this reckoning with the overzealousness of nature watchers. People have very strong feelings toward owls because of their “charismatic” status and reputation in cultures the world over as being wise, mystical, or otherwise mysterious. Owls also tend to sit near the top of the food chain, meaning there are relatively few owls out there compared to many of the other birds that people might admire.
I have observed the conversation about “ethical birding” play out in real time over the past five years. Attitudes among avid fans of birds (my sample being strangers who I have passing conversations with out in the park) have turned away from artificial means of attracting birds via food or audio playback. In New York City, a “villain” has emerged on the birding scene—he goes by Birding Bob, and he is infamous for leading birding tours through Central Park with a portable speaker at the ready for blasting songs and calls that might confuse birds into appearing in view. (As an amusing aside, Birding Bob and I graduated from the same high school.) Audio playback is a particularly contentious topic, with figures like Bob keeping such discourse at the forefront.
Birding has also become even more accessible in the past five years, as tools like eBird and Merlin are continually improved and updated, and specialized communication channels like regional birding Discord channels have become popularized. With some combination of these, it is relatively easy to locate an unusual local bird based on the wisdom shared by other users. I have seen some very exciting birds that I never would have otherwise thanks to the New York State Birding Discord.
It’s a wonderful thing that more people continually seem to be taking an interest in their local birds. Birds are a perfect gateway into appreciation and education for the wider natural world. Despite this fact, I do wonder about the damage such easy access to birds could do, both to the “spirit” of the activity and, more importantly, to the well-being of birds.
It is easy for birding to become a sort of game. And, to some extent, why shouldn’t it be one? It has rules, and your progress can be tracked by numbers going up. eBird makes this particularly easy to do, tracking your total species seen in the world (289 as of writing, thank you—hoping to hit 300 in 2026!), as well as any country, state, county, or township, as well as any time period, you might want to zoom in on. This can be a lot of fun! It feels like Pokémon: you gotta catch ‘em all!
This can also turn into a very slippery slope fast. Speaking from experience, when I talk about birding as if it were a game, I’m not really “competing” against anybody other than myself. Still, thinking too hard about the “number go up” element of it all is bound to make me distracted by the birds whenever I go outside. Readers of previous reflections will know that I am very diligent about protecting my attention, so sometimes I do have to make a conscious effort to simply ignore the birds! Easier said than done, especially when you can recognize a good number of them by ear.
More importantly, what does this gamification say about my relationship with the natural world? If I make an excursion out to Prospect Park to see the unusual Varied Thrush, I am looking for the Varied Thrush, and nothing else. This usually means that I am looking for the posse of people with cameras and binoculars, and nothing else. By walking through the woods too fixated on birds, I might be failing to appreciate the other parts of this beautiful, interconnected system. To use a potentially muddy idiom, it’s easy to forget to see the forest for the trees.
Most crucially, there is the well-being of the birds to consider. An individual bird that is crowded by scores of individuals hoping to get a closer look could easily become too stressed to effectively forage, especially in an environment like New York City where it might already be living at the edge of its energetic capacity (and particularly if it’s a vagrant bird outside of its typical range, which most of the birds that draw big crowds are). This is assuming that everybody who sees such a report is well-intentioned. A game hunter could easily access reports of an unusual waterfowl species and go to its location with the hope of killing it for a trophy. Bird lovers generally enjoy sharing their experience with other like-minded folks, but in the digital age, how much sharing is too much?
The people who come out to see a special bird are, I would imagine, generally conscientious about such concerns. That being said, birding still has that game-like quality to it, and in that fervor of getting the best picture or the highest number of species, I can imagine a scenario in which some of the etiquette starts to erode. Why not play some songs to get that Yellow-breasted Chat to think there’s an available female in the vicinity? What if Merlin’s sound ID feature picks up the call of something you have never seen before, and you really, really want a look at it? It’s true that an excellent view of a beautiful, perhaps unusual bird could inspire someone to further admiration and advocacy for the natural world. This is a sentiment that Birding Bob uses to justify his methods, but this sort of line is parroted as justification for actions that harm wildlife time and time again. I believe Joe Exotic said something similar in Tiger King.
I wish there was an easy solution for reconciling this tightrope between accessibility and stewardship in the world of birding. It is a beautiful thing to be able to admire biodiversity that’s practically in one’s own backyard, but how to do so without harming the very subjects we hope to admire is a challenging quandary. The fact that such conversations are at the forefront is already a good sign. eBird and iNaturalist obscure reports of sensitive species like snowy owls and piping plovers, and I have seen firsthand that reports of the location of owls are swiftly deleted from birding Discord by moderators.
Much as Aldo Leopold laid the groundwork for a new land ethic, maybe it is time to move toward a new “birding ethic”. Perhaps this new birding ethic focuses less on the discrete numbers of each species seen and emphasizes interspecies interactions and unique experiences. The culture of birding has already shifted considerably in the half-decade that I have paid attention to it. Time will tell how sentiments will continue to shift.