Living Colors: Diversity and the Future of Birding

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: Okay, here’s some talk about a subject that a lot of us seem to have trouble talking about.

My serious interest in birds began at age six, but at first I birded alone. Then as a young man I was traveling and meeting other birders just a few at a time. So after two decades I still didn’t have a real sense of what the birding community was like. Finally by about the time I hit thirty, I was getting invited to speak to bird clubs and birding festivals all over the continent, and it dawned on me: Wow, we’re practically all white people here.

Once I had noticed, it was strikingly obvious. I’d be doing a bird program for an audience of 200 in New York, or South Carolina, or Alabama, or Chicago, and I’d realize that there wasn’t a single black face in the crowd. Or I’d be talking to a large group at a bird meeting in California or Arizona or Texas, and there would be hardly a face in the room that looked Hispanic or Native American.

The situation remains unchanged today. Kimberly and I live in Ohio, where the population is (according to the 2000 census) about 12 percent black. But when I go to popular birding spots, like the boardwalk at Magee Marsh in spring, the ratio of black birders that I see is not 12 percent, which would be one out of eight people - - it’s more like one out of three hundred. Likewise at big birding festivals and popular birding sites elsewhere on the continent, people of color are just vanishingly scarce.

Why does this bother me? Two reasons.

One, I hate the idea that there might be something exclusionary about birding. I would never join an organization that practiced any kind of discrimination. The birders I know are not racists; I’d like to think we’d be overjoyed to welcome more people of color into our fun times in the field.

But secondly, I’m concerned about bird conservation and the future. Birds and their habitats need all the friends they can get. If an interest in birds continues to be mainly something for white people, support for bird conservation is going to decline. The group that the Census Bureau categorizes as "Non-Hispanic Whites" already makes up less than 50 percent of the population in California, Texas, and New Mexico, and if current trends continue, the same will be true for the U.S. as a whole in a couple of decades. If we really care about the long-term survival of our bird populations, therefore, we need to bring a more diverse crowd of people into the birding world.

Fortunately, there are a few people who are not only talking about this issue, but actively doing something about it. And some of those leaders in the field are coming to our area of Ohio in about a month, bringing practical info on what we can do about it. I’m proud to say that our Black Swamp Bird Observatory is partnering with Toledo Metroparks and Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge to put on a conference: Diversity in Outdoor Recreation: The Many Faces of Conservation. You can read all about it right here. Kimberly and I will blog some more about this issue within the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, if you can make it to Toledo on September 26, come and join us! This is a great chance to show your support for diversity and learn what to do about it.

Here’s our friend John C. Robinson, taking a group of enthusiastic and fun-loving young birders out on a field trip in California. John is a leading authority on the issue of diversity in the outdoors, and the author of Birding for Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers. He will be a featured speaker at the conference on September 26.