{"id":2028,"date":"2009-01-14T18:16:55","date_gmt":"2009-01-15T01:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=2028"},"modified":"2016-12-01T16:13:54","modified_gmt":"2016-12-01T23:13:54","slug":"is-my-name-legion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/14\/is-my-name-legion\/","title":{"rendered":"Is My Name Legion?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s an interesting conversation going on (as usual) over at Amy&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/wildbirdonthefly.blogspot.com\/2009\/01\/actually-closer-to-48-million-birders.html\">WildBird<\/a> blog: Just how many birders are there in North America?<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"La Caume birders birding\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/rickwright\/13946766069\/in\/photolist-nfqPDX-nfqJdV-nuSQRN-nfr4hE-nuSJz9-nfqQCZ-nmBJG8-rpSw1G-nwEfGJ-nwCnmZ-nwWMHm-nwVtn6-nwCmka-qKEgVp-nxaAy9-nwWHcN-rGkGdu-nfqRt7-nwVo8t-rGkEDY-ro89nn-njz4bE-nfqCtk-nfqwQ4-nfqKRs-nhTBcT-nfVGKY-iUZZVc-iV4QsY-iV4Qzb-iV4PtJ-iUZYBR-ipDXYb-ieLhmu-ieLhbu-ieMcex-ieMbvi-ieLWrY-ieLWey-ieLMuS-ieLJjJ-ieLvfr-ieLu1x-ieLQZf-ieMNLp-ieMXLP-ieMM2f-ieNiCo-g6xC9W-g6xcHH\" data-flickr-embed=\"true\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/c6.staticflickr.com\/8\/7342\/13946766069_ccef46d812.jpg\" alt=\"La Caume birders birding\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" \/><\/a><script src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>The commonest figures bandied about&#8211;77 million, 48 million&#8211;are patently absurd, but I suspect that <a href=\"http:\/\/10000birds.com\/\">Mike<\/a>&#8216;s guess of 200,000, though clearly more realistic, might be a little low.<\/p>\n<p>It all sent me scurrying back to my copy of the 2006 NSFHWAR (gesundheit!), where a more interesting number lurks. Table 42, awkwardly entitled &#8220;Away-From-Home Wildlife Watchers by Wildlife Observed, Photographed, or Fed and Place,&#8221; claims that 20.025 million Americans &#8220;observed,&#8221; &#8220;photographed,&#8221; or &#8220;fed&#8221; birds someplace other than their own yard in 2006. Of those, though, only 8.805 million had watched &#8220;other birds&#8221;&#8211;the catch-all category taking in all but a few big, clunky, popular species such as cardinals, herons, and ducks. And of all those, only 2.657 million left their home state to look at those &#8220;other birds.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Not a bad definition of a birder, is it: Someone who travels to look at birds that aren&#8217;t in the kiddy books. Obivously, there are plenty of birders who are content to cultivate their own sheep (or is it return to their own gardens? I can never remember), and are thus excluded by the definition; but I&#8217;m guessing that this figure of two and a half million is about as close as we can get.<\/p>\n<p>Is it plausible? Is one out of every 125 Americans a birder? (I&#8217;m assuming that my Facebook &#8220;friends&#8221; roster is not a representative sample.) Pima County, Arizona, where we live, probably has as high a birder population as anywhere in the country; with a population of slightly more than a million (ack), the county should have 8,000 birders. It doesn&#8217;t. Bellevue, Nebraska, where I grew up, had a population in my day of 25,000, and so should have had 200 birders. It didn&#8217;t. Hamilton, New York, where I commute to during the academic year, has a population of 5,700, and so should have 45 birders. It doesn&#8217;t, yet.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s work it backwards. I know, say, 100 birders in Tucson. I knew 25 in Bellevue. We know 5 in Hamilton. That&#8217;s 130 birders out of 1.03 million,\u00a0 which would translate to about 40,000 birders in the entire United States.\u00a0 That&#8217;s what, 800 in each state: Massachusetts makes it, New Jersey, California, Texas, Florida, maybe Arizona; but Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota&#8230;.?<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s only one solution. Ask everybody in the country a simple question: Are you a birder? If they respond with anything more than a blank stare, then they count!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s an interesting conversation going on (as usual) over at Amy&#8217;s WildBird blog: Just how many birders are there in North America? The commonest figures bandied about&#8211;77 million, 48 million&#8211;are patently absurd, but I suspect that Mike&#8216;s guess of 200,000, though clearly more realistic, might be a little low. It all sent me scurrying back &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/14\/is-my-name-legion\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Is My Name Legion?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2028"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10646,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028\/revisions\/10646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}