Virtually all of the 20 or so birders and bird-adjacent professionals I spoke with attributed the shift to two watershed events. The first is the coronavirus pandemic: At a moment when many Americans spent far too much time anxiously bouncing around their own home, birding represented a low-stress, low-screen, outdoor activity that could be done without travel.
The second is a revolution in birding tech. Birders have always used the newest tools available to them, whether vinyl records of bird calls, rare-bird hotlines, or push notifications. (***mega is lingo for an ultrarare species noted on eBird, a forum where birders report sightings.) But soon after the bird-identification app Merlin introduced Sound ID, a sort of Shazam for bird calls, in 2021, millions of people started using the app, including the 29-year-old Super Bowl champion Sam Darnold and the 33-year-old pop star Ariana Grande.
Merlin and similar tools have upended the culture of birding. Ten years ago, aspiring birders had little choice but to learn from the old-timers, who might be less than cool or less than welcoming. Jessica Wills, a 43-year-old birder who works in the restaurant industry in Tucson, Arizona, told me that older birders have sometimes walked up to her to explain things she already knows, or rudely corrected beginner birders when they make a mistaken ID. The apps have freed new birders to learn a good deal on their own. Instead of memorizing birds’ sounds and physical appearances, you can start a Merlin recording, see what songs it picks up, see what the birds singing them look like, and then try to locate them in your binoculars. And instead of staking out bird habitats for days on end in the hopes of seeing an elusive species, you can browse bird sightings on Discord or eBird. Several people I interviewed described birding as akin to Pokémon Go. (Really, Pokémon Go is a knockoff of birding.)
Tech, etc have opened new horizons for birding recruitment.