Americans flock to bird-watching

It’s called a “spark bird,” and every bird-watcher has one.

Mine came to me a few years ago, during the height of the pandemic, when I happened to look out of my window to see a little bird flutter to a nearby maple tree. I see a lot of robins and woodpeckers here in Oregon, but this bird was different — tiny, about the size of a lemon, a delicate creature sporting a sunny yellow breast and a crown capped by a jaunty black patch. How adorable, I thought, and set out on a quest to identify it. A Wilson’s warbler, I eventually learned, and my spark bird had a name.

It sparked my interest in noticing birds. Having a spark bird is common among bird-watchers, though the type of bird is as varied as the 10,968 species humans know of.

A recent study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finds that one-third of all Americans over the age of 16 are interested in birds, be it by watching them, photographing them, feeding them or even taking trips to see them. That’s 96 million people, up from 45 million people in 2016.

The early pandemic period spurred interest in birding, but its popularity is enduring. Birding is easy to do anywhere, especially with free smartphone apps that make identifying birds fun and convenient. “You can tell how old a birder is by how many bird books they have on their shelves,” says Clayton Taylor, who helps develop bird-watching optics like binoculars and spotting scopes for Swarovski Optik in Rhode Island. “Newer birders don’t need books. It’s all on their phones.”

Apps, like Merlin Bird ID, guide users through a step-by-step identification process or use artificial intelligence to name a bird by looking at its photo. One of the app’s well-loved functions uses a smartphone’s microphone to identify a bird by its song. “The vast majority of users are using that,” says Pat Leonard, a spokeswoman at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which created the app. She says more than 5.4 million people used Merlin Bird ID in May, a 71% leap over the same month a year ago. That app dovetails nicely with another of the lab’s apps, eBird, where citizen scientists can upload the birds they identify into a database that tracks bird movements with real-time accuracy.

Social media is also making it easier to find people to go birding with, Taylor notes.

“The social aspect of it is more than just going and looking for chickadees and bluebirds and red-tailed hawks,” he says. “There are Black birding weekends and LGBTQ birding weekends and a broad spectrum of people who’ve always been there but just not birding in the mainstream.” The number who participated in the lab’s annual Great Backyard Bird Count soared to more than 600,000 people in 2024, too, when bird-watchers collectively saw nearly 8,000 of the world’s known bird species in a single day.

That attention raises awareness about threats to birds from habitat loss, free-roaming cats and pesticides. “We have lost 3 billion birds since 1970 — a staggering number,” says Marshall Johnson, the chief conservation officer at the National Audubon Society.

To help reverse those trends, Congress has passed laws designed to curb trading in exotic birds, a practice that can destroy ecosystems and ruin local economies, while allocating money to groups that protect migratory pathways.

And groups and agencies like the U.S. Migratory Bird Conservation Commission, the American Bird Conservancy, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are restoring forests, wetlands and other crucial habitats. Through the North American Wetlands Conservation Act and the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service funds projects throughout the Western Hemisphere to protect millions of acres of bird habitat. And the agency’s Combating Wildlife Trafficking Program supports projects to stop the trade in exotic songbirds.

“Demand for exotic pets can drive animal populations, like birds, extinct in the countries where they are being sourced,” says Jen Miller, with the Fish and Wildlife Service. It’s why she and others in U.S. agencies support partnerships with trade communities to stop the illegal songbird trade.

Meanwhile, cities like New York and Washington are addressing the problem of millions of bird deaths per year that occur after they fly into windows. The cities are regulating new buildings so that they install special glass that birds can more easily see and avoid. Chicago participates in “lights out” programs that keep exterior lights on buildings dim to avoid attracting and confusing birds. And more people are becoming aware of just how lethal their pet house cats can be when hunting birds.

For folks like me, however, birding remains a pleasing activity I can do whenever I am outdoors. I can walk the dog and look for house finches. I can go to the grocery store and see a mourning dove perched above the parking lot. I am becoming a lot like my friend Dan Moore, who drives an electric vehicle and chooses his recharging stations based on where he can best look for birds.

“It just adds a nice layer to anything,” he says. And as I look out my window and wonder if another warbler might drop by, I can empathize.

Tim Neville is a freelance writer.