Via Verge, an article on eBird, a social network that connects people to each other and also with birds:
It was a beach date that would transform Chris Michaud, though the memorable parts were neither the beach nor the date but what he saw that day. Both in their early 30s, summer of 2017, Chris had met Gemma recently, swiping on Bumble. They decided to head to the New Hampshire coast, not far from where they both lived in Portsmouth. Before arriving at the beach, Gemma suggested they do a little birding.
In a marsh, they spotted egrets, a glossy ibis, and “some other cool stuff.” Later, they went to the beach, as promised, but Chris just kept thinking about the birds. This moment, in birding lingo, is called the “spark,” when a person sees something that inspires them to be a birder for life. (Nearly everyone I talked to for this story had a spark and volunteered their story whether I asked for it or not.)
Since then, Chris has been an avid birder and, like many avid birders, is a frequent user of an app called eBird. Naturally, bird watching today involves going out into the world, encountering something wonderful, strange, perhaps even profound or moving, and then logging it on your phone.
Along with Merlin, which helps people identify species of birds, eBird lets people keep track of the ones they’ve seen and, in doing so, become part of a crowdsourced, citizen-science mission. Whether users care or not, the millions of birds being observed tell scientists about huge patterns in climate change.
For Chris, though, using eBird is about the thrill of adding every new species he encounters. When we first speak, he immediately summons the exact number of different birds he’d seen: “315 species — pretty cool, right?”
Though Gemma was studying birds professionally as an ornithologist, it was Chris who became the bigger birding hobbyist. When they went together, Chris would be quick to suggest a bird was rare. Gemma tended to make safer guesses, to assume what was more likely. Chris understood — but what if? It was the personality divide you might expect between a woman of science and a man who works in marketing.
The reality, for Chris, was that getting into birds was a confluence of many things. There was the budding relationship, the struggle to get sober, that relationship fracturing, and, then, the cancer.
Alcoholism, breakups, even lymphoma — sad as they are, these are things that happen to lots of people. But not everyone got to see what Chris did because, eventually, he bore witness to a rare bird — an appearance so exceptional that everyone I asked would agree that, if you were very lucky, it was something you got to witness once in a lifetime. A once-in-a-lifetime bird!
For Chris, birding was existential, maybe even lifesaving. And it could be for the rest of us too, whether we know it or not. Anomalous, unusual sightings are thrilling to birders, but it’s the sum of all their everyday, boring observations that tell us the most about the world we live in, and how we might save it.
To experience nature is to delight in it. To reckon with nature is to understand that we’re dealing with an unfathomable amount of loss.
A 2019 study published in Science discovered that in North America, nearly 3 billion birds have vanished. The staggering decline of bird populations over the past 50 years is the result of “human-altered landscapes” and “an indicator of a coming collapse of the overall environment.” You know, climate change.
The data that eBird collects is obviously useful in the field of ornithology. But its more urgent application, according to Chris Wood, director of eBird, is comprehending our dying planet. “Birds as indicators of natural systems overall,” he explains. Any data that is spatial and temporal is useful for climate scientists. But birds especially, because of their susceptibility to minor temperature fluctuations, can be more reliable signals of change. He apologizes for the cliché, then evokes the notion of a canary in a coal mine. To me, the metaphor says less about birds but more powerfully suggests that we all live in a coal mine.
Who am I? What am I doing? What is interesting to me? What do I care about?
When I speak with Wood, who is also the managing director for the Center for Avian Population Studies, he has recently absconded to Tampa for the winter. He’s been working on eBird ever since it started as an informal grant from the National Science Foundation. This month marks 20 years since eBird launched originally as a website. As a tool of mass data collection, the two decades of eBird development have paralleled the tech sector’s shift from statistical analysis to artificial intelligence. (You can chart that change in buzz words — from “AI” to ”big data” to “machine learning” and back to “AI.”)
Climate change is a systems problem, and the prevailing attitude among scientists is that understanding those many ecological apparatuses and how they interact with each other is our best shot at modeling what will happen and how fucked or not fucked we might be. Birds may make up just one of those many systems, but eBird offers one of the few global data sets that can be measured across an annual cycle.
Still, eBird’s value follows a familiar tactic from large advertising platforms like Google and Facebook: lots and lots of signals generated by users of a free app. Which means a wealth of messy data points. The best way to overcome unreliable data? Get more of it at scale. When it comes to gathering information, there’s no such thing as excess.
Several people I spoke to compared the app to Pokémon, in the sense that they were motivated “to catch them all.” But in many ways, eBird is the flipside. Where Pokémon Go, the popular mobile iteration of the game, takes all of its massive stores of player geolocation data and sells it to — who else? — advertisers, the data collected by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is made publicly available and used for scientific research. In contrast to surveillance capitalism, this is, perhaps, surveillance naturalism.
It’s hard to know how much drinking will kill a person until it does.
In the early ’00s, Chris was in Maine’s music industry. He was the baritone sax player for a screamo band called Animal Suit Driveby, later rebranded The Killing Moon after the label asked for a more serious name. But more importantly, he was part of the scene. “We were raging, we were rampaging, having a good time,” he recalls. Reviewing our interview transcript later, I realize, for how often we’re talking about drinking, Chris tends to avoid the word itself.
That life — raging, rampaging, having a good time — extended into his 30s, even long after his moment in music passed.
Gemma had her concerns. Before he went out, she’d ask him tough questions that were, in hindsight, easy questions: Could he go out to dinner and not have six drinks alone? Could he resist going to a bar after that? Was it even possible to imagine limiting himself to just one drink?
So he got sober. It was hard for all the obvious reasons; it was also difficult because sobriety was so boring.
“When you’re in your 30s, that’s all you’ve done in your formative adult years. You have no actual hobbies, and all you are is that party person, and all your friends are those party people,” he says. Pulling out cold turkey — which, for most people, is the only way to do it — left him with existential questions: Who am I? What am I doing? What is interesting to me? What do I care about?
Chris goes birding for three, maybe four hours at a time. His favorite spot is near a waste-water treatment plant in Rochester, New Hampshire. Chris prefers the solitude of birding alone. He considers himself an introvert, at least ever since he stopped drinking. “I like to be able to pick up and go wherever, switch directions and drive somewhere else, and not have to worry about anyone else,” he says, which is good because he was by himself now anyway.
Two and a half years into their relationship, Gemma was offered a three-year contract at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which in addition to making eBird, is widely considered the best avian studies program in the world. The job was six hours west in upstate New York. Chris offered to pack up his life and move to Ithaca with her. Gemma said she was going alone.
Two weeks after Gemma left, Chris was diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that attacks white blood cells. Weirdly, he was good news / bad news about the whole thing. “First up, Hodgkin’s is a great cancer,” he says, citing its treatability, “but stage 4 is never a great stage to be in.”
More ups and downs: because the chemo jacked Chris’ body full of steroids, it actually made him feel pretty terrific for a day or two afterward — the perfect opportunity to get outside. No hikes, of course, but little drives to the beach to hobble around and observe some birds. Then, after the steroids wore off, Chris would spend the next week and a half feeling like absolute death.
He was stuck in this loop for six months straight: the brief high of treatment, followed by the drawn-out agony, all in the pursuit of staying alive long enough for the cancer to be exorcised from his body.
Even while he was being treated, getting pumped with four types of chemo, he was texting Gemma. They’d remained friends and talked every day. “A lot of times, it was like, ‘Check out this picture of this bird,’ that sort of thing, while I’m sitting, literally cooking from the inside,” he says, describing himself further as “a boiling, toxic mess.”
“I don’t think there’s ever a time when I go out that I don’t think of the genesis of this entire hobby and who brought it into my life,” he says.
The nice thing about getting outside and birding is that it reminded him of Gemma — but also, it reminded him of Gemma.
At its heart, eBird is a social network. It connects people to each other and also with birds.
But any social network must have social network problems, right? I ask Jenna Curtis, an eBird project leader who works on engagement and outreach. But first, she tells me about her “spark” — her first bird — and also her thousandth, memorable both because it was a Buller’s shearwater and because she saw it while at sea and seasick. “I was cheering my thousandth bird over the railing of a boat.”
I mentioned that a friend of mine in Brooklyn, a casual birder, is a huge eBird fan. But he told me that if you see an owl, it is bad etiquette to log it. In New York in particular, listing snowy owls in Central Park tended to activate waves of birders — too many, a number that would disturb the owl. Comedian Steve Martin had posted about the celebrity bird on Facebook; recently, the death of local hero Barry the Owl was reported out like it was a true-crime podcast (she was poisoned… before being hit by a truck!). Curtis says this can be the case with owls — they are “a charismatic bird” — and some other species, particularly endangered ones. Diplomatically, Wood told me he never wants to be quoted about “anything related to owls.”
Even a social network about birds has harassment issues, though this one is concerned about the safety of the birds.
But eBird also keeps an index of “sensitive species” for this reason, meaning that when a user observes one, it will be kept in their personal log but obscured from public view. No alerts will go out for sensitive birds. Falcons, often caught and traded to raptor trainers, are usually hidden from eBird for their own protection. (Even a social network about birds has harassment issues, though this one is concerned about the safety of the birds.)
Somewhat ironically, a number of experts attributed the growing popularity of birding as a reaction to people’s growing dependence on screen time. Anecdotally, there are those who pick up birding because they wish to look at their phones less. But common trends in technology have also bolstered the hobby. There is eBird, of course, which capitalizes on our habit of posting things in an app. But there is also the proliferation of cheaper, better cameras — digital SLRs are available, and nearly everyone walks around with a powerful lens on their phone. The community of amateur photographers tends to organize in Facebook groups. An even broader community exists on Twitter, where birding evangelists help newbies identify species from grainy photos. #CrowOrNo is, self-explanatorily, a constant quiz of whether something is a crow or not.
But you can chart birding’s growing popularity through eBird’s user numbers, which have nearly doubled over the pandemic to more than a quarter-million people. (One person I talked to said, “Are you really a birder if you don’t use eBird?”) Last year, the app logged its billionth bird observation. Maybe we can spot birds faster than we lose them.
The academic world is cruel and a bit petty. “There’s the ‘publish or die’ concept, and you’re always comparing yourself to other people,” Gemma Clucas says. She spends a lot of her time writing things for journals that no one ever reads.
At Oxford, she researched the connectivity of penguin colonies in Antarctica. In Portsmouth, she studied Atlantic cod for her postdoc. Now, in Ithaca, one of her big projects is about seabird diets. “I’m just doing some fecal DNA analysis or whatever,” she says. The whatever, it turns out, involves going to common and roseate tern colonies in the Gulf of Maine, covering herself in plastic, getting pooped on, and collecting the samples. “And that tells me what they’re eating.”
I have about 400 questions. Like, is there a special poop-collecting jacket? There is not, she says — just the old clothes you don’t mind getting shit on.
So they poop on you, and you’re scraping off your shirt and…
“Yeah.”
She’ll take a couple weeks in the summer to visit the colony each day while they’re breeding. She’ll collect two to three hundred samples.
(It occurs to me that Gemma’s work has less to do with acquiring feces and more what she does with it after. This doesn’t change my line of questioning.)
Is there a thing you do to encourage them to poop?
“As soon as you come close to their nest, pooping on you is their defense mechanism.”
Before she got the offer from Cornell, Gemma was in the midst of a crisis of competence. For the last decade, academic jobs have become underfunded and underpaid, and that’s only made them more competitive. “I found it really hard to write the application,” she says. “I was like, ‘I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.’” Her acceptance at Cornell felt like a reversal of fortune. She had to take it.
When she told Chris about the job, that she was leaving, he had a panic attack. Gemma took him to the hospital. They would try to be friends.
Two months later, Gemma was back in the UK, visiting home, when Chris called to tell her about the cancer. She considered taking a break from Cornell to take care of him, worried about his health and also that he might relapse. “I wished we were still together because I would’ve dropped everything to go support him if I could,” she says. “But that wasn’t an option. That’s not what he wanted.”
They texted every day. Gemma went to visit. Chris was the kind of person resistant to getting support or, perhaps, admitting that he needed it. She tried to get him outside. “I think that helped,” Gemma says. “I like to think it helped.”
For a brief moment, the most famous birder was Christian Cooper. He was looking for songbirds in Central Park when he was accosted by a white woman named Amy Cooper, who threatened to call the police on Christian for being, in her eyes, a large and threatening Black man, even though he had a pair of dorky binoculars dangling from his neck.
It was a viral moment on Twitter before it reached other social platforms and then, inevitably, the cable news cycle. Lost in much of the conversation about anti-Blackness, white privilege, and policing was the fact that Christian Cooper was birding. It’s how their confrontation started: Christian asking Amy to put her dog on a leash since they scare away birds. But it seemed to her that the image of Christian was too incongruous, which is an insidious form of racism: when a person cannot reconcile what they perceive as an identity with what is actually in front of them. The usual reaction to that is defensiveness or fear or, in Amy’s case, indignation.
Nearly every person I talked to for this story at some point brought up the fact that birding is, historically, very white and often very male and usually made up of older people. But that’s not entirely the case.
Sheridan Alford is an environmental educator and also an advocate for younger, more diverse birders.
Binoculars, she says, are more conspicuous than I’d realized, especially if you’re birding somewhere that’s not a park. She has other tips for Black birders: go during the daytime, and if you have to go at night — for nocturnal birds, like owls — go in large groups; take along a dog or a white person; carry a field guide, less for what it says about nature but as proof that you’re birding, in case someone doubts you; and lastly, when birding takes you to private property, she “would not be caught dead on the other side of someone’s fence.”
If Twitter offers a hint of a community’s cross section, Alford sees more diversity than Black and white. She cites the South Americans being active on birding hashtags, “which makes sense because they have all the birds,” she says, admitting a little jealousy. She also sees Asians, who tend to be obsessed with the photography aspect of birding. (I concede to her that I have a Vietnamese uncle who does exactly this.)
Alford was one of the organizers of Black Birders Week, an online campaign to get people — newbies and veterans alike — out of their homes and into nature during the pandemic. The idea came from a group text called Black in STEM AF, after a conversation about Christian Cooper’s experience. Organized in a group chat and then spread across Instagram and Twitter, suddenly it was a national campaign and, since then, repeated annually. This month, National Geographic announced a TV series with Christian Cooper.
Before we get off the phone, Alford leaves me with one last piece of wisdom.
“You can always get started by just walking outside. You don’t have to get super expensive binoculars,” she says. “To see a bird is to bird. That’s all!”
By the end of 2020, Chris had moved back to rural Maine. His marketing job at Planet Fitness was mostly Zoom meetings anyway, so it hardly mattered where he was living. Why not save some money and get out of the city?
The cancer was in remission. He was still recovering from what the chemo did to his body. His eyebrows grew back. But after a year inside, the pandemic arrived and extended his lockdown.
Chris’ parents had a place in a tiny, remote town called Steuben. Now, between conference calls and emails, Chris could look out the window and glimpse a stoat, maybe a fox. One day, above the marsh, he caught sight of a small bird perched atop a scraggly, dead tree. At first, he thought it was a shrike — affectionately nicknamed a “butcherbird” for the way it murders field mice. But Chris looked closer and realized it was… a weird robin?
Initially, he assumed it was a juvenile robin. Young birds looked, to Chris, “disheveled and gross… the wrong color and speckle-y.” Ugly but unremarkable. He returned to his conference call. Yet something in the back of Chris’ mind screamed, This is not right. So he took his camera out and, from his desk, snapped a few photos of the bird.
The pictures were not great. They were pixelated, out of focus, foggy. (“It’s a shitty camera.”) He put the seven photos in a folder named “weird robin.” He sent it to Gemma.
Gemma was skeptical, knowing how excitable Chris could be. She tends to be more cautious since, in her field, there’s a stigma around getting things wrong. As an amateur, the stakes for Chris were a bit lower, which meant he could be more hopeful, more wishful, though that may have actually made the stakes higher.
Still, Gemma showed her co-workers at the Cornell Lab the photos of Chris’ “weird robin.”
Chris, proving that excitability, recounted that moment: “She started sending texts back from them. They’re like, ‘Holy shit, this is a redwing!’”
As a non-birder, this means nothing to me, so Chris explains: this bird is not an uncommon one. The redwing can be found easily in Sweden, Iceland, and in the UK when they migrate in the winter. But to see one thousands of miles away — across the Atlantic Ocean, no less — that was unbelievable. The enthusiasm around this bird was not what it was but where.
There’s a term for this observation: an ABA rarity, short for American Birding Association, which is responsible for, among other things, sending out an email of notable sightings.
“If there’s a rare bird in Maine and I’m not looking at it, I’m just miserable until then.”
Because of the reach of eBird’s “rare bird alert,” users like Chris feel some responsibility about what they report. Birders are known to descend on rare bird sightings in droves, sometimes in the hundreds, hoping to catch a glimpse. They’ll drive for hours; some might even hop on cross-country flights. This phenomenon is called “twitching.”
It’s not just owls. In the fall of 2020, a European cuckoo had twitchers swarming Providence, Rhode Island. (You can guess what the headlines were.)
Chris understands this impulse because he, too, is an “unapologetic twitcher.”
How far do you go when you’re twitching?
“Not that long. Probably, like, two hours maybe.”
That’s pretty far.
“Like I said, people will drive, like, 15 hours.”
Chris was new to the area. He’d been there four months and had yet to meet his neighbors. He worried that setting off a chain of events that would result in droves of strangers showing up suddenly and with binoculars might piss off long-time Steuben residents. After all, you don’t live in a thousand-person town in rural Maine because you like company.
“It was like Chris’ dream come true but at the absolute worst time when he couldn’t have hundreds of birders flocking to see his bird,” Gemma says. “That was the really bittersweet thing about it.” (The redwing was not particularly special to her personally, having seen them often growing up in the UK.)
Chris’ other worry was that he looked like a bit of “a flatlander.”
“Flatlander” — is that a Maine thing or a birding thing?
“That’s a Maine thing.” He clarifies: if you’re “from away,” you’re a flatlander. “I’m a new guy in town. I’m a flatlander with New Hampshire plates.”
So Chris made a choice. He didn’t log it in eBird, worried that it might set off the ABA rarity email. Instead, he emailed the Audubon Society. He was connected with the staff naturalist, who then hit up someone at the Maine Bird Records Committee.
Etiquette aside, Chris still had his concerns about triggering a twitching. “I was like, ‘You can come to my parents’ house, but you can’t tell anyone.’ They were like, ‘Oh my god, yes.’”
It would have to be a secret but not a total secret. You know, for science. In the case of rare bird sightings, you bring in the authorities to verify it. Also, these guys really wanted to see this bird.
One of those guys, Louis Bevier, harbors some skepticism of eBird. His concerns come from 50 years of experience. In the ’70s, he was part of a movement that established record committees that encouraged people to write good descriptions, take clear photos, and capture audio recordings whenever they could — which would then be independently verified. He’s done bird work in California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and, finally, Maine, where he has been involved with the Maine Bird Records Committee for the past 17 years.
After proudly telling me he was not on any “of the social medias,” Bevier said he recognizes the power of what eBird collects. But he has some worries about the quality of the information. “When I review things, I’ll see people put in photographs of common birds, and they’re the wrong species,” he says.
All data sets are imperfect, but there are better ways to gauge error rates than what eBird is currently doing, Bevier says. To his knowledge, no one’s done a study on eBird’s accuracy.
A research associate at Cornell Labs, Frank La Sorte, pushed back on these criticisms of the information quality, arguing that sampling errors are a part of any data set. There are robust tools that account for these issues. On top of that, anomalies are manually verified by a team of volunteer eBird moderators.
But to Bevier, eBird is a new entrant that relies on amateurs rather than ones that are, to him, more rigorously vetted by experts. “In my years of reviewing records, I’ve seen the whole breadth of human behavior,” he says.
There are the embellishers; then, there are the straight-up liars, committing what I would describe as “bird fraud.” Sometimes it involves a bad Photoshop job. One guy took a picture of a common tern and put a different, larger head on it to make it appear to be a royal tern. The hope was his fake rare bird sighting might direct people to his photography business. Bevier also tells me about someone that lied about spotting a rare seabird from the Antarctic and made up some convoluted story about seeing it while on a boat in Monterey, California. His motives, to this day, are still unknown.
Most errors, of course, are honest ones. “People are just not being careful,” he says.
If it is human to err, maybe it comes from a place of optimism. The rigor of science and research will help us understand what’s wrong with the planet; but hope — even in the face of devastation — keeps people alive.
When Bevier heard about the redwing spotted in Steuben, he was suspicious, too. But it wasn’t entirely unexpected. BirdCast, another Cornell Labs product, uses eBird data to predict migration and weather patterns. Recently, it revealed that birds flying between Greenland, Iceland, and other parts of Europe had made appearances in the area. Even Bevier, with half a century of birding under his belt, had to be excited by the prospect of a redwing.
“Well, that would be the first record for Maine!”
Doug Hitchcox, the staff naturalist at Maine Audubon, gets dozens of emails a day asking him to identify birds: What’s this bird? Can you tell me what this is?
“And they’re robins. They’re almost all robins,” he says.
Hitchcox started as a volunteer for the Audubon. A decade later, now in his early 30s, he is a fixture of the Maine birding scene. Throughout our conversation, he alludes vaguely to the community, where certain figures will keep rare bird sightings to themselves, and how he’s had to overcome that “elitism.”
Hitchcox was visiting his family in Massachusetts for Christmas when he received Chris’ email with the redwing. Hitchcox turned to his loved ones and told them he had to go. He understands himself, you see: “If there’s a rare bird in Maine and I’m not looking at it, I’m just miserable until then,” he tells me.
The ABA has a numbered coding system for bird rarity. The highest is a five. Chris’ redwing clocked in at a four, which, Hitchcox says, “you maybe have a once-in-a-lifetime chance of seeing.” A code four happens in Maine maybe once every half-decade. A redwing may never appear in the state again. Christmas, by contrast, happens every year.
Three days later, Hitchcox woke up at 3AM. He picked up Louis Bevier in his Prius, and they drove up Route 1A toward the coast, admiring the ascending sun peeking over Acadia National Park. Bevier observed a thin crescent moon, rising as well, as they made their way to Steuben.
Chris greeted the duo at his house at 7AM, pleasant and slightly begrudging that it was the earliest he’d woken up during the pandemic. Despite his high spirits, he was nervous about bothering the locals. So they treaded lightly, so as to not upset Chris’ neighbors before he’d even met them. “We were three dudes walking around where there’s not usually three dudes walking around,” Chris says.
He showed them the perch where the bird sat when he’d snapped the original photos. Perhaps it might return to that spot. Then they wandered all over, hopeful.
By the end of the day, Hitchcox knew the names of all of Chris’ neighbors. “We talked about the bird, and it would turn into Chris just introducing himself, talking about how his family bought the house,” Hitchcox recounts. But after five hours of seeking out the rare bird, it never materialized. No redwing anywhere. Chris kept apologizing — “God, guys, I’m so sorry. I just feel terrible.”
I asked Hitchcox if he felt disappointed that day, and his response led me to believe that he had been nothing short of devastated: “There was my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity… gone.”
Bevier, who has been birding now for 50 years, was less disheartened: “I’m used to it, at this point. I don’t get dejected,” Bevier says. “That’s the breaks.”
Days later, a redwing did appear just 180 miles southwest in Portland, Maine. It was a much better, safer location for visiting birders — a public park instead of someone’s backyard. The ABA email announced it. The thrush stuck around the city for two weeks, where Hitchcox estimated a few hundred people turned up to witness it.
Hitchcox says the tone of our conversation would have been very different if the redwing hadn’t shown up in Portland. “I would not be laughing.”
After comparing his photos to what the ABA released, Chris is personally convinced that the redwing that appeared in Portland is a different one, based on the breast streaking. It wasn’t his redwing.
When the news of the rare bird in Portland emerged, Chris took pride in knowing he’d been the first person to sight one in Maine — and, later, quietly logged it in his phone.
Many rare birds are just lost. In 2018, a great black hawk — usually native to Central and South America — was spotted in Texas for the first time. A few months later, the same neotropical bird was found in Biddeford, Maine, then later in Portland. It was briefly the state’s celebrity bird before the hawk — a Mexican bird in Maine winter — suffered injuries from exposure and was euthanized. A statue of the bird exists now, monument to the stray raptor.
We know now what threw Chris’ redwing off course, turning it from a common European bird to a once-in-a-lifetime one in America. The catalyst: a low-pressure system, turning counterclockwise, scooped the redwing up and hurled it across the Atlantic. A 2018 study by Cornell Labs indicates these increasingly common wind changes are caused by climate change. What once was rare may become less so as our weather systems collapse.
I have a hard time reconciling it: that thousands of people will come to gawk at something because it is out of place. Or the irony of the massive carbon footprint created by people who want to appreciate something in nature.
The planet’s greatest threat is people that “have no connection with the natural world and don’t care.”
“Birdwatchers love these unusual sightings,” Frank La Sorte says after I tell him about Chris’ redwing. But this isn’t what scientists are interested in. They want to study patterns, not exceptions. “We want people to go out there and find the birds. We don’t want to discourage them. But as scientists, the outliers are statistically problematic.”
The things we see every day are valuable. The once-in-a-lifetime experience that was so meaningful to Chris is the kind of data point that scientists tend to discard.
La Sorte sends me some of his research, gathered from eBird data, which has been published in scientific journals: migratory birds at higher risks because of climate change, something about anomalies in the mid-latitudes. I find even the summaries dense, so much so that he has to walk me through them.
With eBird, Cornell Labs has an extremely accessible way to get the average person to understand their surroundings. But that gets transformed into material published in fairly inaccessible journals.
“As a scientist, you’re focused on doing really rigorous science that often can be quite abstract,” La Sorte says. “Now I’m realizing that there’s importance in communicating this to a broader audience.” He’s working on publishing something that “synthesizes the material” and is written “in a more layman set of terms.”
eBird managing director Chris Wood has a simpler, more ambitious goal in mind. To him, the planet’s greatest threat is people that “have no connection with the natural world and don’t care.” Birders may be overeager, but in many ways, they overcome the biggest obstacle to a sustainable future: apathy.
It’s not until another 451 days that I talk to Chris Michaud again. The week before, he’d gotten checked out, and the cancer was still in remission. His eBird life list has risen to 342. According to an oddly specific app called Sober Time, he hasn’t had a drink in 1518.53 days.
More importantly, Chris is in a much better place now — emotionally, physically, and geographically (he’d moved back to Portsmouth). He’s still single, but he and Gemma talk, as friends, just as often as before. The new thing is that he’s into Zen Buddhist meditation, which he does daily. And, of course, there is still the birding. After our call, he says he’ll go out and enjoy it in the 70-degree weather.
The life-changing thing about Chris’ redwing wasn’t its appearance. It’s what he learned when it was over: that the rare bird event was another way to not think about what was really haunting his mind. “Seeing the redwing was a massive bright spot,” he says, “but I was in the deepest, darkest hole.” The truth was that the winter of 2020, which he spent isolated in a pastoral cabin, had put him in deep depression. “Woof,” Chris says, giving me the gritty details of his headspace.
With hindsight, he had a revelation: that a once-in-a-lifetime event is easier to conceive of because the things that happen every day are more painful. That to never have a drink again, he would have to wake up each morning and think about all the things he needed to do — exercise, bird, meditate — to move forward, to keep on living.
Do you think most about the past, present, or future?
“All the strategy in the world doesn’t actually solve anything whatsoever,” Chris says. “But yeah, it’s always the future.”
Do we have a future on this planet? I don’t know. Even the climate scientists, observing day by day the slow collapse of systems, aren’t sure. But maybe I was overthinking it. We could, like Chris, just take each day as it arrives. I returned to some advice I’d once been given:
Via Sentinel, an interesting initiative to reimagine and democratize environmental data:
The Sentinel is Conservation X Labs’ new artificial intelligence device that addresses emerging extinction threats. The tool retrofits existing devices, such as trail cameras and acoustic recorders, to enhance how efficiently conservationists can act on important events.
The device instantly runs machine learning models on data as it is captured and sends notifications to users in real-time. This allows users to know if something critical, like the presence of a poacher or endangered species, is detected so they can take immediate action.
Henrik Cox, Product Management Engineer, deploys a Sentinel to monitor wildlife in Virginia.
“The Sentinel democratizes creating, running, and deploying machine learning models by providing leverage to conservationists everywhere” said Alex Dehgan, Co-Founder and CEO of Conservation X Labs. “The Sentinel will fundamentally change how we monitor and protect the environment – from catching poachers before they can get away, monitoring endangered species in real time, and detecting new diseases before it’s too late.”
Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence through tools like the Sentinel can profoundly increase the scale and efficiency of conservation efforts to better understand and respond to environmental challenges and will allow us to better protect animals around the world.
The Sentinel has been selected for use in a variety of unique projects around the world capturing wide-ranging information, including identifying rare jaguars in Costa Rica, informing wildlife crime officers of suspicious behavior in South Africa, and monitoring gorilla behavior in the Congo. It was a grand prize winner at the 2021 ASME ISHOW, an international accelerator for hardware-led social innovations.
Via Mongabay, an article on an initiative in Sri Lanka to identify individual marine turtles in the island’s waters which uses photos taken by recreational divers to build up a database based on their unique facial patterns:
The Polhena reef and the surrounding shallow seas in southern Sri Lanka are home to a number of marine turtles that stay there year round. Randunu Dimeshan, a managing partner at the Polhena Diving Center who frequently swims in the area with his diving clients, has frequently encountered these turtles and been able to identify a few individuals from notable physical features such as a scar on a flipper or a damaged carapace.
Meanwhile, Chathurika Munasinghe, a marine biologist at the Ocean Conservation and Education Alliance (OCEA), had recently returned from a research project in the Maldives armed with a special set of knowledge and skills: identifying sea turtles based on photo identification.
Dimeshan met Munasinghe during a discussion of underwater cleanups, and this gave rise to the idea of setting up a similar citizen-science initiative in Sri Lanka. After preparations, the pair launched the Sri Lanka Turtle ID project in August 2019, several months before the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
“Turtles have specific facial scale patterns that are unique to each individual,” Munasinghe told Mongabay. “Just like fingerprints [on humans], the facial scale patterns can be used to identify turtles.”
To build up this database of turtle mug shots, the researchers needed, well, mug shots: clear photographs of both sides of the face and, optionally, an image of the shell. They worked with dive centers to get the latters’ clients to take photos during dives. These photos can be uploaded to the Turtle ID project website, where special software is able to pick up facial patterns and compare them with patterns from already identified individuals stored in the database. If the facial pattern is new, the photo contributor is given the chance to name the new individual.
Facial identification
The Turtle ID project has so far identified 18 hawksbill turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata) and three green turtles (Chelonia mydas), all of them female. Of the seven marine turtle species found around the world, five can be observed in Sri Lankan waters. The olive ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys olivacea) is the most common, but these are mostly found farther out in the open ocean.
“The hawksbill turtles stay closer to the coral reefs as they prefer to feed on sponges that are mostly found in association with coral reefs,” Munasinghe said. “These are the areas where most of the researchers and recreational tourists dive, so the chances of encountering hawksbill is higher.”
Dimeshan said they’ve put a name on all of the identified turtle faces. Tammy was the first to be identified and was named after the nickname of a mutual friend of the project founders. Some of the others are Alice, Avondster, Shelah, Polly, Keyara, Olya, and Chuta.
The project allows the observer who uploads photos of a previously unidentified turtle to name it. Image courtesy of Terney Pradeep Kumara.
Creating a database of sea turtles to assess the population size of each species is the main aim of the initiative. Some of the turtles use Sri Lankan waters as feeding ground, especially where reefs abound, so learning how they use certain reefs for feeding and breeding is another project aim. The team also expects the database to shed some light on turtle migratory patterns in the long run.
Munasinghe said the idea was inspired by her firsthand experience in the Maldives initiative. There, a similar project begun in 2011 has to date compiled individual records for more than 1,270 turtles, according to Marine Savers, the group running the initiative. The results indicate that the Maldivian hawksbills remain in their home reefs throughout the year, traveling only between reefs less than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) apart, while green turtles tend to use multiple reefs for feeding.
“The Sri Lankan data show that we mainly observe female and juvenile turtles on the reefs, with few males of either species being spotted by our researchers,” Munasinghe said.
The technique of using facial pattern-based identification was introduced by French scientist Claire Jean of the Kélonia aquarium in the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, an observatory specializing in marine turtles.
Before then, most studies on marine turtle populations relied on capturing animals and tagging them with a marker such as a flipper tag or transmitter, which can be costly. Tags are also dif?cult to apply to turtles, as they remain in the water unless they reach beaches for nesting. So almost all physical tags are generally applied to nesting females. The photo identification method is both more cost effective and avoids putting the animals under any stress, Jean wrote in a 2010 paper.
Turtles get unique IDS
The Sri Lanka Turtle ID project uses open-source software called I3S pattern at its back end, employing machine identification of the turtles. The process is simple: reference points are first taken at the tip of the nose, the inner edge of the eye, and the furthest scale. The software then outlines the other identification zones and automatically selects 35 points within the zones as identification marks. Once this is completed, the program shows which turtles have the closest match based on the identification marks, and a user can either mark it as a previously identified turtle or a new individual.
The same technique can be used to identify individuals from other species, including whale sharks based on spot patterns.The technology is also thought to have the potential to identify large rays.
Many of Sri Lanka’s reefs have resident turtles, and some local groups have started feeding them in order to habituate them for tourism purposes. Marine biologists say they disapprove of this practice. Image by Malaka Rodrigo.
Munasinghe and Dimeshan have led several introductory sessions for researchers and recreational divers, their main focus being to get dive centers to support the photo ID project.
But the Turtle ID project got off to a rocky start, with COVID-19 hitting just months after its launch. In Sri Lanka, the government imposed a nationwide lockdown in early 2020, forcing the closure of dive centers and scuppering the Turtle ID project. Marine research in general has come to a halt in the year and a half since then.
In recent months, however, there’s been a greater sense of urgency around turtle conservation in Sri Lanka, following the sinking of the MV X-Press Pearl cargo ship off the western coast of the island in early June. The ship was carrying a cargo of nitric acid and plastic pellets, among other items, and was also loaded with 378 metric tons of bunker fuel. In the months since its sinking, more than 200 marine turtles have washed up dead on the beaches and in the waters in the vicinity.
Munasinghe said she’s hopeful of being able to dive soon and to update the database, with a view to contributing to turtle conservation efforts.
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Via Mongabay, an article on how – armed with data and smartphones – Amazon communities are fighting deforestation:
>Equipping Indigenous communities in the Amazon with remote-monitoring technology can reduce illegal deforestation, a new study has found.
> Between 2018 and 2019, researchers implemented technology-based forest-monitoring programs in 36 communities within the Peruvian Amazon.
Compared with other communities where the program wasn’t implemented, those under the program saw 52% and 21% less deforestation in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
> The gains were concentrated in communities at highest risk of deforestation due to threats like logging and illegal mining.
Teaching Indigenous communities in the Amazon to tap on remote-monitoring technologies during forest patrols can reduce illegal deforestation, a new study has found.
Researchers, whose work was published July 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), implemented technology-based forest-monitoring programs in 36 communities in Loreto, the northernmost department of Peru, between 2018 and 2019. They trained and paid three representatives from each community to patrol their forests monthly and verify reports of suspected deforestation using a smartphone application and satellite data.
Compared with 37 other communities in Loreto where the program wasn’t implemented, those under the program saw 52% and 21% less deforestation in 2018 and 2019 respectively. The gains were concentrated in communities at highest risk of deforestation due to threats like illegal mining, logging, and the planting of illicit crops such as coca to manufacture cocaine, the researchers found.
The collaboration between Rainforest Foundation US (RFUS), the World Resources Institute (WRI), Indigenous leaders and independent researchers is the latest in a growing body of research that says recognizing and protecting Indigenous rights is the most effective way to preserve natural rainforests. In Latin America, studies have shown Indigenous people to be by far the best guardians of forests in the region, with deforestation rates up to 50% lower in their territories than elsewhere.
One-third of the Amazon Rainforest falls within formally acknowledged Indigenous peoples’ territories. Community-based forest monitoring programs coupled with enforcement support from local officials could save one-fifth of the 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres) of rainforest in Brazilian and Peruvian Indigenous territories likely to be lost over the next decade, RFUS estimated.
Deforestation alerts from satellite data have long been publicly available. WRI’s Global Forest Watch (GFW) tool relies on an algorithm developed by university researchers to detect changes in forest cover through satellite imagery. In Peru, the national Geobosques platform uses GFW data to issue early alerts of suspected deforestation.
However, these alerts rarely filter down to remote rainforest groups lacking reliable internet access, resulting in communities often detecting illegal deforestation activities only when they are well underway and difficult to halt.
“The whole point is to put the deforestation information into the hands of those most affected by its consequences and who can take action to stop it,” Tom Bewick, who is the Peru country director for RFUS and who was involved in the study, said in a statement.
During the two-year study, researchers hired couriers to traverse the Amazon River and its tributaries every month to deliver USB drives containing Geobosques reports of suspected deforestation to remote communities.
Trained representatives, or monitors, would then upload this information into a specialized smartphone application, which they used to navigate to the locations of forest disturbances during their monthly patrols. Where they identified cases of unauthorized deforestation, monitors would take photos as evidence and flag them to the community, which could then decide to report it to local authorities.
Monitors use the smartphone app Locus Map to identify GPS coordinates of deforestation for their regular patrols. Photo credit: Cameron Ellis
“We are helping them set up this system by which they can collect the evidence but our hope is that then we walk away,” Suzanne Pelletier, executive director of RFUS, said in a video. “They can then train others and be the model for thousands of other communities across the Amazon.”
Over the two-year period, communities under the program saved 456 hectares (1,127 acres) of rainforest, preventing the release of more than 234,000 metric tons of carbon emissions at a cost of $5 a ton. This makes it slightly more expensive than the $4.30 a ton average price of nature-based, forest management carbon credits in 2019, according to data from Ecosystem Marketplace.
But while nature-based credits have traditionally been plagued by the problem of leakage — where ecosystem conservation projects, even if successful in one area, often shift deforestation to another location — the researchers observed no such displacement of deforestation for the communities in their study.
They theorized this could be due to the inaccessibility of the forests in Loreto. “In the region that we study, in the general absence of roads, most transportation occurs by boat. As a result, the areas most vulnerable to deforestation are located close to navigable rivers,” they wrote in their report. Since Indigenous communities in Loreto also tend to live along the river, community-based forest-monitoring programs increase the cost of resource extraction, they said.
A Kichwa monitor fills out a report confirming an occurrence of illegal deforestation after returning from a forest patrol. Photo credit: Melvin Shipa Sihuango
“The study provides evidence that supporting our communities with the latest technology and training can help reduce deforestation in our territories,” Jorge Perez Rubio, president of the Indigenous group Regional Organization of the People of the Eastern Amazon (ORPIO), said in a statement. ORPIO worked with RFUS and WRI to implement the forest-monitoring programs in the study.
“Our network is ready to partner with Rainforest Foundation US to apply this technology-enabled model to our community forest protection initiatives basin-wide,” Gregorio Mirabal, general coordinator of the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), said in a statement. COICA, which was not involved in the study, is an umbrella association for Indigenous organizations in the Amazon lowlands, of which ORPIO is a part.
Via The Wall Street Journal, an article on how conservationists hope newly launched open-source tools will lend more insight into endangered species and the effects of climate change:
Cameroon’s Dja Faunal Reserve is one of the largest undisturbed areas in Africa. Elephants trample through the trees, monkeys call to one another, and insects hum, all with barely any human interference. The lack of roads and dense forest have protected the biodiversity there, but the same remoteness has left the impact of climate change on the area little understood. Instead of trying to set up camp for a few weeks at a time, researchers are turning to tools they hope will gather data delicately and indefinitely.
“So often the science stops when you leave these places,” says Shah Selbe, a former rocket scientist and the co-founder of FieldKit, a Los Angeles nonprofit building open-source tools to gather conservation data. “If we can create low-cost tools that make monitoring easier, we can start to get more data.”
Big Data has transformed industries from finance to drug discovery. Conservationists, however, haven’t had the same access to deep data sets because of the difficulty and cost involved in gathering data in the wilderness.
To help, startups are developing open-source technology built to monitor the environment, from equipment that records the sounds of the forest to devices that collect data on weather conditions. The hope is that open-source tech will make it cheap enough to gather data. In turn, the data could lend greater insights into where to focus efforts to save endangered species and tackle the effects of climate change.
The open-source movement advocates sharing design information so that anyone can inspect and improve upon the tools that are built. Often, the groups behind the tech are nonprofits, typically resulting in hardware and software that are cheaper than commercial counterparts. Researchers can adapt the tools without worrying about breaking a user agreement or warranty. With more adaptable tools, projects could range from learning about a single species to ecosystems as large as the polar regions.
FieldKit makes a water-resistant device about the size of a coffee-table book that allows users to gather data on water temperature, weather conditions, pH levels and more. Launched this month, the $150 device includes a computer chip that can accommodate a variety of environmental sensors and add-ons, which run $50 to $205 each. FieldKit also offers two prebuilt models, one for water quality and another for weather conditions. A prebuilt model for air-quality is coming soon. Prices include a small margin to support Conservify, FieldKit’s parent nonprofit, which currently relies on grants to fund its operations.
The units were built to withstand environments from rainforests to freezing tundra, and to collect data for weeks or even months at a time, says Mr. Selbe. He expects that many users will be full-time researchers affiliated with nonprofits or universities, but he says it was important to sell prebuilt kits to expand the potential audience to students and individuals without technical backgrounds.
“You can take the FieldKit out of the box, download the app, and be monitoring in five minutes,” he says.
FieldKit’s website hosts the data collected on the devices. Mr. Selbe says that he hopes that most researchers will put their data on the platform, enabling even researchers and enthusiasts without FieldKits to use it. There is an option to disguise location information to protect endangered species or sensitive locations, Mr. Selbe says.
Much of the conservation technology builds on open-source tools made for more general uses, such as Raspberry Pi’s simple, single-board computer chips and Tensorflow, Google’s machine-learning platform. These advances have been essential for the cash-strapped environmental research community, says Alasdair Davies, co-founder of the Arribada Initiative, a nonprofit that builds open-source technology with partners who require technical expertise.
“We are riding the wave going on in the commercial space and repurposing it for conservation,” Mr. Davies says.
More devices in the field mean more data, but analyzing all of it can prove impossible for solo researchers and small teams. Citizen scientists have volunteered to label, transcribe or otherwise organize data on scores of different projects, including labeling wildlife caught on camera in a New York forest and transcribing old weather logs from the U.S. Navy. Some research even requires volunteers, such as Arribada’s Carnivore Bytes project, which aims to learn more about wild dogs in part by gathering data on people’s pets.
Carnivore Bytes in January sent recording devices that clip onto collars to hundreds of dog owners. With an app, volunteers note when their dogs are doing things like panting, playing or eating. Eventually, the data is meant to help train an algorithm to go through wild-dog noises for insights into how climate change is impacting their lives. For example, wild dogs making fewer eating noises could suggest that prey is scarce and hunger is becoming an issue.
Open Acoustic Devices, based in the U.K., sells acoustic recording devices called AudioMoths for $60, compared with hundreds or thousands of dollars for a commercial version. Since launching in 2018, AudioMoth has sold about 20,000 units, according to co-founder Andy Hill. The sales, along with occasional work building custom software to go along with AudioMoth projects, allow Mr. Hill and another founder to work on the technology full-time, he says.
AudioMoths have been used to record thousands of hours of sound. In one project, researchers are recording marine mammal vocalizations in an effort to decode the different sounds that dolphins, manatees and whales use to communicate. Mr. Hill estimates that projects have, on average, used 10 to 100 AudioMoths, which has greatly improved the quality and quantity of data.
“Without open-source technology, you are going to be limited to one-species studies with one device,” he says. “That hasn’t really gotten us anywhere when it comes to conservation.”
Open-source technology is also allowing more people to engage in environmental research, says Lydia Gibson, an ecologist and National Geographic explorer who uses it in her fieldwork.
Still, conservation isn’t just about technology, she says. It is also about the people who use the tools and the local communities that participate, actively or not. Conservation has gotten better about including more voices and respecting local expertise, and those strides can’t be lost as shiny new tools are added to research tool kits, Ms. Gibson says.
“A focus on technology needs to include a holistic view of how it’s used,” she says. “Technology on its own is not the solution.”
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Courtesy of Outside, an interesting article on how – over the past two decades – eBird has become the go-to online platform for scientists and hobbyists alike to upload and share bird observations:
In July 1992, two Danish birders visiting Patagonia, Arizona reported the first-ever, mega-rare cinnamon hummingbird in the United States. Back then, reporting rare birds required phoning in observations to a “rare bird phone tree,” usually via the nearest pay phone—and hoping that word got out. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. In this case, a couple of other out-of-towners—a birder from Mississippi and another from Nebraska—saw the species. The Nebraskan photographed the hummingbird, flew home, developed the slide film, and snail-mailed photos to the Arizona committee in charge of validating unusual sightings. Only then did word spread, but it was too late: the hummingbird was gone, and Arizona birders missed it.
This kind of tragedy would never befall Arizona birders today. Now, within minutes of seeing a rarity, birders can text friends, alert listservs, post sightings to Facebook rare-birds groups, and—the choice of many—submit observations to eBird, a global online database.
At its most basic level, eBird documents bird sightings. A team at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology created the platform in 2002, and it became widely used by birders within a few years. As of 2020, it has collected more than 860 million global bird observations from over 597,000 registered eBirders. By sheer numbers alone, eBird is one of the world’s largest citizen-science projects. It is now used to understand species distributions, population trends, migration pathways, and even habitat use.
“If used properly, it should be a tool to understand bird populations at scale in ways we never have before, and to apply that to conservation actions,” Marshall Iliff, an eBird project leader, told me. Scientists use eBird’s open-access data to study evolution and movement of invasive species and to highlight the importance of public lands in conservation. The eBird team has also created conservation-oriented status and trend maps for hundreds of species, and eBird data are used to create live bird-migration forecasts.
At least 120 million observations are submitted per year, many through the handy eBird app, a kind of Strava-Yelp-Pokémon Go hybrid for birders. The app doesn’t ID birds for you—Cornell offers another app called Merlin for that—but instead provides an easy way to record and upload the birds you spot. To log sightings, you start a checklist (similar to the way you’d start a run on a smartwatch) and the app automatically pulls your location via GPS. You can choose hot spots near you, which generate lists of species you’re likely to see created from data submitted by users in those areas. The app tracks time and distance traveled while you “tick” species and numbers of birds seen and heard. It even lets you keep an offline checklist, so you aren’t inconvenienced without cell service. On the web platform, users can upload photos and audio recordings to beef up checklist documentation. Once submitted, the observations join thousands of others being made on the platform at any given time.
The scope and accessibility of eBird make it a resource for birders and scientists alike. The majority of eBirders use the platform as a handy bird-logging tool. I study birds for my Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico, and I also watch them recreationally. I use eBird almost daily for everything from tracking how far I walk while scanning treetops, to planning vacation birding spots, to scouting remote Andean field sites for my doctoral work. Anyone can review lists of species in hot spots like the Ramble in Central Park stretching back decades, study maps of where birds are seen, analyze how frequently certain birds appear at different times of the year, and peruse photos and audio recordings from all over the globe.
Undeniably, eBird has changed birding culture, a quirky world already full of strong opinions. It brings birders together and allows for rapid information sharing. It’s also created new—and sometimes contentious—etiquette and social dynamics.
The closest thing to an official guide for birding etiquette is the American Birding Association’s Code of Birding Ethics, which emphasizes a few basic tenets that can be summarized as: Respect fellow birders, their diverse interests, and skill levels. Welcome and encourage beginners. Respect birds and other wildlife. Don’t trespass on private or restricted property. Be mindful of space and privacy when birding in groups. (Since the pandemic, a new set of guidelines on birding and social distancing has been added to the code, titled “Keep your eyes on the sky and your butt close to home!”)
Birders are typically friendly, both in person and online, with email exchanges often ending in well-wishes of “Good birding!” But a code of ethics is necessary because, as with any activity that can become competitive, birding has a dark side. Rivalry, animosity, and ego have long been hallmarks of the bird world. Even the famous naturalist John James Audubon plagiarized and invented species to convince members of the English nobility to promote his work. Birders sometimes go to semi-desperate lengths to track down birds, and online platforms like eBird that rank birders and sightings, akin to athletes on leaderboards, can amplify competition.
Although eBird is primarily an observation tool and a scientific database, the site still allows users to size each other up: anyone can view rankings of the top eBirders in different hot spots, counties, states, and entire countries. You can even peruse a list of the top 100 eBirders in the world. These types of competitive lists have birthed trends like endless Big Years, in which birders constantly compete to see who can spot the most species in a year. In turn, such fads have spurred counterinitiatives, like the five-mile-radius challenge, which encourages birders to enjoy birds in local areas rather than seeking them out in far-flung places. Local birding has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, as many work from home and explore their own backyards.
Screenshots from the author’s eBird app showing checklists and hot spots in her home state of New Mexico (Photo: eBird)
If an eBird user makes their profile public, other eBirders can view their recently submitted checklists and photos. Essentially, this means that birders can keep tabs on one another. Last October, when a friend was in Belize, I lived vicariously through his trip by peeking at his eBird checklists each day, and they brightened my mood amid dropping fall temperatures in New Mexico. I’ve also received unexpected text or Facebook messages from birders with quips like, “Looks like you had an awesome day!” after they saw checklists I submitted. These interactions shouldn’t be surprising, given the public nature of eBird data, but it occasionally strikes me as odd that people I don’t know well can see exactly where I walked for eight hours and exactly how many Wilson’s warblers I counted while I did so.
The eBird database also maintains a frequently updated alerts bulletin called the Rare Bird Alert. The RBA, as many lovingly call it, pushes notifications to users so they can quickly find out who’s seeing what and where. The excitement of rare, sought-after species fuels cultures of chasing and listing that emphasize the prestige of finding rare birds and seeing more species than others.
Chasing rarities is certainly exciting—like an ephemeral, high-stakes treasure hunt where the pot of gold has wings—but the hobby can also turn into an obsession. I’ve heard stories of constant “twitching,” or compulsive bird chasing, nearly ending serious romantic relationships. For some, a reputation for finding rare birds becomes a noteworthy part of their identity. Last fall I met a birder at a popular migrant trap, a small patch of trees with a trickle of water, on the windswept plains of eastern New Mexico. He introduced himself to me by name, followed by, “You might recognize me from the Rare Bird Alert.”
A thirst for finding rarities can also encourage behavior that goes against common courtesy. One eBird app reviewer, “Notta Realname,” noted that after spotting an unusual bird for their locality, birders rang their doorbell, asking to sit in their backyard so they could see the bird. Notta Realname reported being “flummoxed” but welcomed the birders into their backyard anyway and then became frustrated when the unexpected guests displayed “questionable” ethics. Notta Realname turned away subsequent birders and then changed their privacy settings. All birders I know would agree: showing up at a stranger’s doorstep unannounced is bad form.
Because eBird is not a social-media site—there is no way to follow friends or comment on sightings—these types of interactions filter onto other platforms. Last fall an 11-year-old friend and beginning birder ticked the wrong species of quail on her checklist, which made it look like a bird from Africa and the Arabian Peninsula had been sighted in central New Mexico. Rather than wait for eBirders to flag the mistake respectfully, someone made fun of her in a Facebook birding group.
Occasionally, eBird itself is the site of bad behavior. Recently, a respected birder misidentified a common lazuli bunting for a more unusual species: a dickcissel, or “DICK” in four-letter shorthand speak, a sparrowlike bird of open grasslands easily recognized by its “flatulent buzz” calls. Several experienced birders tried correcting his mistake, but he stubbornly refused to change his ID, insisting the bird was simply “odd-looking.”
As with any activity that can become competitive, birding has a dark side.
I had my own run-in with bad behavior on eBird last November. I’d gotten wind via the eBird Rare Bird Alert that a vagrant woodcock had been spotted along the Rio Grande near Albuquerque, New Mexico, just 15 minutes from my house. American woodcocks are iconic little solitary shorebirds that live in forests and constantly bob while they walk, and they’re rarely seen out west. Naturally, I had to chase this bird. At 7 A.M. on a Sunday, I found myself walking along the river, kicking up piles of dead leaves in an attempt to flush the woodcock.
After a few hours, I’d had no luck. As I headed back to my car, I passed a group of birders also searching for the woodcock. We chatted for a bit before a well-known birder—the one who misidentified the DICK—recognized me. With a facetious smile, he asked, “How’s your goose ID going?”
The other birders stared blankly while I brimmed with silent shock and anger. He was publicly mocking me—a week before, he’d emailed me about a misidentified Ross’s goose I posted on eBird. Embarrassed, I quickly updated my observation. Our interaction should have ended there, but instead he was now calling me out for my mistake—gleefully—in front of others.
“Fine,” I said curtly, before walking back to my car.
When I got home, I ranted to my significant other, who is used to hearing too much about birds. He thought I sounded more wound up than usual—eBird can sometimes do that to you.
In recent years, eBird has grown tremendously. Between 2019 and 2020 alone, observations submitted to the database increased by 24 percent. Some believe that the rise in new eBird users is associated with a dangerous level of data imprecision. Can the data be trustworthy if they come from millions of observers who might not be able to correctly identify common backyard birds? As one well-known California birder has been known to say, “The average birder is below average.”
This is where data-vetting steps, like eBird’s review process, come in. Each eBird reviewer is a volunteer selected for their knowledge or experience in a state, region, or country. Reviewers act as quality filters and check observations for accuracy, detail, and validity. They may contact observers to request specific details about unusual sightings, point out misidentifications, or ask for justification about higher-than-expected numbers reported for a particular species. Some reviewers even go out of their way to coach users unfamiliar with eBird on how to use the database and app to enhance the quality of the information. This verification effort, in turn, makes eBird data more valuable to birders, citizen scientists, and professional scientists.
“My goal when reviewing is to make sure that an observation is documented well enough so that, in 100 years, someone who doesn’t know who the observer is can say, ‘This is reasonable,’” says Lauren Harter, an eBird reviewer of more than nine years for the Colorado River area.
Given their status, reviewers are privy to moments of birding vulnerability, such as when birders make identification mistakes. Errors are expected—even the world’s best can confuse extremely similar-looking immature gulls or drab flycatchers. If an eBird reviewer catches an ID mistake, usually from a photo, they reach out to the eBird user, typically with a polite template email that starts with, “Thank you for being a part of eBird. To help make sure that eBird can be used for scientific research and conservation, volunteers like me follow up on unusual sightings as a part of the eBird data quality process.” They’ll then explain why the species is listed incorrectly and request that the user change the ID to the correct species.
Given their status, reviewers are privy to moments of birding vulnerability.
This mutual respect between reviewers and birders tracks with offline birding etiquette, but sometimes interactions can turn to rudeness. The birder who made fun of me for my goose mistake, for example, was a New Mexico eBird reviewer, and one birder friend, after hearing the story, called the reviewer’s comment to me “way out of line.”
The relationship between reviewers and observers can be tricky to navigate. Reviewers sometimes screen as many as several hundred sightings per month, and they certainly deal with their fair share of user mistakes. I became increasingly respectful of the work they do as I spoke to more reviewers for this story. But some believe that reviewers exercise their power unfairly—for example, by accepting rare sightings by birders with good reputations, even with scarce documentation—and impose personal rules about how birding should be done in “their” territory.
Last year a friend birded at a popular eBird hot spot outside Raleigh, North Carolina, during a work trip. After submitting his checklist, he was contacted by a local reviewer who, in typical birder fashion, sent him overly detailed instructions about how to walk around the lake. My friend, a birder of 34 years, felt like his freedom to explore had been violated. There was a right and wrong way to walk around a lake now? “I was bemused that someone would want to exert control over how others experience a place,” he told me. “The idea that a hot spot has to be birded in a certain way and recorded in a certain way really takes the enjoyment out of visiting new places.”
Despite the fact that eBird has become an almost unstoppable force, some birders have resisted the eBird tide. They see the platform—and the “Cornell mafia,” as one birder put it—as supplanting traditional methods of birding that many still prefer. Observers who don’t use eBird still rely heavily on listservs or Facebook birding groups, but this can limit access to information.
“It makes you almost have to be an eBirder to keep track of this stuff anymore,” says Gary Rosenberg, a professional bird-watching guide of more than 35 years. “I call it eBorg,” he says, referencing the Star Trek character who transforms people into drones through assimilation. “If you’re not on eBird, you’re currently just sort of left out in the cold.”
On the flip side, eBird has encouraged people who may not have birded previously to contribute sightings in a popular forum. This citizen-science participation aspect of the platform, coupled with movements like #BlackBirdersWeek, are important for creating a diverse and equitable outdoors community. Increased representation and environmental awareness are sorely needed, given the estimated 2.9 billion birds lost since 1970. “Anything we can do to supercharge an interest in nature is a worthwhile goal unto itself,” says eBird’s Iliff. “I don’t think we’re going to have people who are willing to vote for climate change or preservation of public lands or endangered species, or really care about the world around us, without a level of public engagement.”
For all its unexpected dynamics, eBird has succeeded in connecting birders and scientists in ways that weren’t possible before. Last fall, while browsing through images of the species I study for my Ph.D., the giant hummingbird, I came across a photo of a bird that appeared to be wearing one of the tracking devices I use to research their migration. The eBirder who posted the photo listed his email address publicly, so I reached out to see if he had others. He was friendly, and he happily sent more my way. I flipped through them that night, amazed that a stranger’s photos might have unintended value for my research, and I wondered what other gems remained to be discovered on eBird.
New technical innovations such as location-tracking devices, GPS and satellite communications, remote sensors, laser-imaging technologies, light detection and ranging” (LIDAR) sensing, high-resolution satellite imagery, digital mapping, advanced statistical analytical software and even biotechnology and synthetic biology are revolutionizing conservation in two key ways: first, by revealing the state of our world in unprecedented detail; and, second, by making available more data to more people in more places. The mission of this blog is to track these technical innovations that may give conservation the chance – for the first time – to keep up with, and even get ahead of, the planet’s most intractable environmental challenges. It will also examine the unintended consequences and moral hazards that the use of these new tools may cause.Read More
