The Happy Camper: Are Birdwatchers Loving Birds to Death?



Birdwatching great grey owl

Recently, during an early morning walk in the local Conservation Area, I spotted a Barred Owl perched on a spruce tree. It seemed quite interested in a semi-tamed squirrel sharing the trail with me. I took a quick picture of it with my phone and then rounded the bend in the trail, quickly realizing I wasn’t alone. A few metres away were a dozen birdwatchers snapping photos and videos of the illusive bird of prey with camera lenses the length of one’s arm.

bird barred owl nature

The owl didn’t seem to be too bothered with the onlookers. Or was it? The scene reminded me of a similar incident a number of years ago while I was working for a wildlife rehab centre. We were called to help a Great Grey Owl in a city park. It had dropped to the ground while perched on an old oak tree. It was a birding group that called us and when we arrived, I witnessed over thirty camera-junkie birders gawking at the downed owl they were just snapping photos of.

I went to check out the owl. Unfortunately, it was dead! There were no signs of injury. Just a frozen feathered corpse.

bird watchers photography lens

I bagged the departed owl and brought it back to the centre for an autopsy—a routine check we did for any infectious diseases. We discovered it had died of starvation, and concluded the cause was that the avian enthusiasts harassed the bird long enough that it couldn’t properly hunt for food.

The twitchers came from miles around, for days on end, to spot the Great Grey Owl and to add it to their yearly bird count list. This is a big competition amongst birders—the same thing that the comic movie The Big Year was based on, starring Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson.

The Conservation Authority running the wildlife rehab centre considered charging the birders for illegally hunting the owl. This may seem silly, but they did in fact unlawfully “hunt” the owl. The definition of hunting is not the killing of the species but the pursuit of it. The killing is just the end result of the sport. There was even some thought about the government creating a hunting license or fee for birders. It was perceived that they gave little in return for their obsessive hobby.

bird watching photography lens
Photo by Kevin Callan

Since then, the leisure pursuit of birdwatching has grown considerably. Take a look at the hashtag #birdwatching on TikTok. It has generated 1.9 billion views. There’s also a major boom in birdwatching apps. One such app is Merlin. Over the past four years usage has exploded, from two million in 2021 to more than eight million in 2024. In Canada the app users increased from 160,000 to 710,000. Another app called eBird, where birdwatchers can log their sightings, has received just under 100 million bird observations in 2024. In the US, the most recent data shows that 96 million people (three out of 10 Americans) engage in birdwatching.

Why are more people heading out twitching? The pandemic certainly had a lot to do with it, getting more people outside. In the UK, birdwatching became the second fasted growing past time in 2020 (the first was gardening). It costs nothing to participate in, and one can simply count birds gathering in their backyard feeders and call themselves an active ornithologist. 

birdwatching nature photo

But are the multitudes indirectly killing off what they’re loving and watching? Well, I guarantee there are some misguided birders breaking rules and ethics to add just another bird to their list. The ones I came upon in the park should have snapped a few pictures and then moved on rather than make it a meet and greet party for the entire morning. However, with more people wanting to watch birds, more attention definitely goes towards bird conservation. 

The Christmas Bird Count (held on December 14 and January 5) is an annual counting of bird sightings that is billed as one of North America’s longest-running citizen science projects. It began in 1900 to gather valuable long-term insights into bird population trends. The program is overseen nationally by Birds Canada and the results help to underpin some major reports about Canada’s bird population. The first year it ran there were 27 participants. In 2024 there were 475 counts in Canada and thousands of volunteer bird census-takers.

photographer nature hunt lens

However, with more birders, should they need a license to “hunt” birds? Or would that just complicate things? Would it be just a government cash grab? It’s important to note that birders certainly add money to the economy. It’s estimated that in 2022 North Americans spent 107.6 billion dollars on their hobby, with 14 billion spent on food, lodging and transportation and 19 million spent on binoculars and cameras with those long telescopic lenses.

In a nutshell, more people out their gawking at birds equals more attention towards the protection of them and their habitat. Maybe something as simplistic as birdwatching has become the “gateway drug” to a deeper interest in nature.

What do you think? Comment below with your opinion.

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