Sharing Your Passion For Birds

What a great time to be a birder and to share your birding experiences!

Bird photos and reports can be shared quickly and easily thanks to advances in digistal cameras, optics and the Internet.  Technology is allowing birders to find each other and share their passion to non birders on a larger scale than ever before.

Part of the American Birding Association's early history involved phone trees, birders calling one another to alerts about rare bird sightings.  Then in the early 1990s, we relied on national and state listservs for to share birding information.  Sure, it wasn't without its problems that come from social interaction online, but one could get an email about a Sabine's gull in the morning and take off in the afternoon early from work to go see the rarity.  This didn't neccessarily recruit new birders.  You had to seek out a bird listserv, you had to want to find it an be a part of it.

Many birders have created their own websites and blogs to share their birding passion.  However, there are also different ways to interact with birders all over the world and slyly involve non birders.  A large number of birding enthusiasts have Twitter accounts and use them to share birding photos. As Internet access becomes more common, people can share photos instantaneously.  Last February, I visited Canopy Lodge in Panama which had wireless access in the common area.  I digiscoped birds (like the above crimson-backed tanager and flame-rumped tanager) at the banana feeders and instantly sent them Twitter, giving folks still working at their cubicle a taste of bird life in Central America.

Heck, if you have a steady hand, you can even take photos with your smartphone through a spotting scope and send the images instantly to Facebook and Twitter.  Above is a yellow-headed blackbird photo I took by holding my Blackberry up to my spotting scope. 

Facebook is another area that allows birders to interact and get to know each other and alert each other for cool birding events and field trips.  Tour guides share photos from their latest trips, optics companies give tips on how to use their equipment (Swarovski suggested looking at Jupiter with a spotting scope or binoculars and many birders discovered that even with their 8x42s, Jupiter's moons were easily viewable).

No longer are birders alone in the crowd.  Technology allows us to find and interact with each other like never before–and do it publicly.  Generally when people have Facebook and Twitter accounts, they have friends, family and perhaps coworkers who are non birders follow them.  Perhaps, after awhile the photos and birding chat can inspire them to join the fold.

So…how about you?  How do you interact with other birders?