Robinson, Birding for Everyone

One of the most cherished myths of our pastime is the belief that “anyone can do it,” that birding is democratically open to everyone, from plumbers to professors, from teenagers to dowagers. But look around next time you’re in the field in the US or Canada: as proudly various as your group may be, chances are scandalously good that everybody’s white.

As John Robinson’s new book makes clear, it matters that our Black or Hispanic or Asian birding friends make up such a vanishingly small percentage of birding hobbyists; with those erstwhile minorities fast becoming the majority of Americans, the attitudes and ideas of non-white communities are likely to determine our conservation policy for the foreseeable future, and birding has historically been an important entree to respect for the wider natural world.

Birding for Everyone strikes the reader as at first a bit miscellaneous. The eclecticism of the first chapters results from the book’s trebled audience: “mainstream” white birders who would like to share their hobby with all their friends; the birding industry; and people of color who want to pursue an interest in nature and the outdoors. Following a gracious and beautifully written Foreword by Kenn Kaufman, Robinson’s first chapter is an autobiographical sketch neatly exemplifying the importance of an early mentor to his development as a birder–an inspiration to “mainstream” birders to share their talents.

Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6 are more obviously directed to the tentative beginner. These I found the least satisfactory of the book’s ten chapters, and I have some serious doubts about how encouraging they will be to, say, a young urban teenager. Birding can be practiced without any sort of “hardwara” or “software,” and Robinson’s discussions of binoculars, spotting scopes, tripods, digiscoping rigs, cd-roms, print resources, and subscriptions to BNA Online are simply out of place in a book that wants to make the new birder’s initiation as painless and as inviting as possible. The vaguely described “secrets” of bird identification shared in Chapter 5 are far less useful than the introduction to any of the standard field guides.

I would much rather have seen the space taken up by these chapters devoted instead to some rubrics that I think Robinson treats too superficially. Developing an interest in birds, what birders want, and what good comes of birding, are all topics that get a mere page or two here, but all of critical interest to birding organizations, the birding industry, and birders of any color. I know, from a fascinating few conversations with the author, that Robinson has deep and novel thoughts about these matters, and I would have loved to read more about them here.

Chapter 7 presents the data behind the arguments Robinson tenders in the remainder of the book. By comparing surveys of birders and non-birders from the African-American community with surveys of ABA members and of the US population in general, Robinson reveals some startling statistics. Three particularly long-lived white birders claimed to have met an African American in the field an average of once every twenty-two years–a figure that sounds outlandish but isn’t far off from my own experience. The precise numbers vary, of course, from survey to survey: Robinson found that 28% of his (very small) sample of African Americans “participated” in birding, a number that seems to me still impossibly high; a USF&WS survey produced a more plausibly discouraging figure of 6%.

Why are African Americans so badly underrepresented? (Robinson cites various surveys recording white “participation” rates as high as 48%–clearly badly overstated, but still 8 times the figure for African Americans). Robinson dwells, correctly in my view, on the absence of inspiring mentor figures in the community. He argues that exposure to a positive birding role model would almost certainly vitiate the two most frequent explanations offered by African Americans for their non-participation: a lack of time, and a lack of interest. Time and engagement, says Robinson, can always be found, whatever one’s personal or financial circumstances, if there is a social network supporting an activity; potential natural history enthusiasts need a chance to try it out, a chance that is lacking in communities without birding mentors.

These are, as Robinson’s chapter title points out, “hard facts” indeed. But what can be done about them? Wisely and persuasively, Robinson lets the recommendations for action emerge from the words of his survey subjects, distilling from their thoughtful comments a list of five “activity areas” where efforts should be concentrated.

Significantly, the first of those points of contact is the family. My guess is that for every white birder whose parent or sibling introduced her to the sport, there are 50 who found their impetus and first mentors in the larger community. Because “minority” communities don’t offer as rich a pool of potential birding mentors, and because (it might be argued) the family remains on the whole a more influential setting in those communities, education and exposure efforts must include multiple generations. This is perhaps the most important lesson Robinson offers, one that I hope is taken firmly to heart in cities like Tucson and Nogales.

Schools and community institutions are only slightly less important as points of birding delivery; as Paul Baicich’s eloquent concluding comments note, for many generations schoolteachers played the role of “imbuer,” providing both inspiration and focus for their pupils’ natural historical interests. Park centers, churches, and youth clubs should join the schools in teaching natural history as an access to ecological understanding.

Robinson’s respondents also point to the importance of advertising and public service announcements. Like it or not (I don’t much), the media create our expectations of the appropriate, and I almost never see ads featuring adult birders of any color but pale (have you noticed that attempts at inclusiveness seem always to feature cute children, driving home the message that the grown-up world, the “real” world, is one of division?).

Most importantly, the wider birding community needs to make a conscious effort to support and to promote “minority” birders who can serve as mentors in their own communities. Just how to do this effectively, sensitively, and respectfully is a question Robinson leaves explicitly unanswered here, preferring to let the reader find suggestions in the series of interviews with half a dozen Hispanic, African American, and Asian birding stars. Now here’s some real inspiration, and these pages should be required reading for anyone interested in making birding available to all of us.

There remains for me one nagging fear, subtly articulated by Paul Baicich in his concluding comment to the book. What if birding as we know it is so completely culturally contingent that it can’t be spread to other communities? What if our attempts to do so constitute a neocolonialist imposition of white, European values on cultures whose own views of the outside world are irreconcilable with those of the western Enlightenment? Robinson largely decines to address this critical question. But I for one am willing to give up birding as we know it if it means engaging all Americans in the fight to save the wild patrimony that is, as Robinson’s title reminds us, “for everyone.”