Creating "content" in birding
The Parakeet issue parallels another issue in birding. I am undeniably middle-aged. I'm not old-fashioned - I have teenage children and worked with young people for twenty years - but I am definitely not young. I can't manage more than one social media platform (probably why almost nobody is reading this), and I spend as much time as most scrolling through nonsense on my phone or the internet. With that said, I'm an inveterate reader and would pretty much prefer long form written content over any other. It's why I write a blog - that and my general lack of visual appeal because nobody needs to see more of me. However, just like the new soundscape of the birds of the UK, like it or not, short form videos lacking nuance or depth seem to be part of the birding world and are here to stay.
It's so important that birding as a whole hobby engages with new media types, and creating engagement with "content" is vital in our communication about environmental issues to a younger audience who might have the agency to choose a different direction in their politics and their own lives in order to restore the natural world to something like health. While it's not my cup of tea and firmly not aimed at old men like me, it has been refreshing to see high quality video content, Vlogs, instructional and educational shorts and other audio/visual media that promotes positivity about the wild world in general. There are some very talented people developing and leading this wave of media and I applaud their vision and hope to be supportive of new expressions in general. In fact, if you're like me, a middle-aged or older person in birding than I would say you and I have a duty to understand the content that younger people engage in. We don't have to like it, it isn't for us necessarily, but increasingly it's how new birders are coming to the hobby.
These new birders don't have a hinterland of trusted and experienced people they can learn from and emulate. I read a couple of excellent blogs this week about people who had sadly passed away and the people who wrote about them were reflecting on the role models they had been in their own birding. This has been the way we have passed on fieldcraft and knowledge for generations. You bird like the people you go birding with. But what if you began birding because you downloaded the Merlin app to find out what that weird bird song was in your garden? What if you got into birding because you watched a 90 second Tiktok and it looked cool? What if you saw how relaxed and happy the people are in Vlogs on YouTube when they're searching for something interesting, and got caught up in their quest to find a rare bird? How then would you learn? It wouldn't be by picking up a bird book, or seeking out a long form written piece like mine. It would be by accessing the same media that first exposed you to birding. It would be by seeking a short form video to help you. In fact, your phone would be the centre of your birding world.
This means that, if we want to help people learn good fieldcraft, to have skills of identification, to participate in citizen science, we must engage them where they are at. I don't have the skills to make a good Tiktok video. I don't have any desire to be on Instagram or Facebook, let alone the current horror-iteration of Twitter, or YouTube. But I can't just shrug as if it's irrelevant. It won't be long before there are more birders who do engage primarily on those platforms than there are old guys like me who don't. So I can't produce the content that will engage younger, newer, more social media connected people with environmental issues, but I can encourage and promote those who do. I always try to like and repost content that other people produce that I feel does this - it's important to engage positively with those who are treading ground that we can't.
For a bit of balance, having been generally positive about short form video content on birding, I've had a couple of encounters with YouTubers, Tiktokers, and other self-appointed influencer types recording Tiktok videos in the middle of a nature reserve. I will never not find this funny - despite wanting to encourage video makers, actually seeing it happen in the wild is amusing to me. I've bumped into more than one person commentating on their own walk, paying no attention to the wildlife they're ostensibly there to see, and instead looking earnestly into camera and hoping to deliver engaging enough narrative to go viral, because that seems to be the goal of producing the content. Not to educate or inspire, though I'm sure that's a secondary effect those people would approve of, but to drive numbers of clicks, views, likes. Will we get to the point that we have in my local gym where there are more pouting people in lycra, filming themselves doing some baffling exercise in order to get more followers than there are people sweating and trying to get fitter? I have a mental image of a hide full of people all recording themselves intently watching a bird, all done for show as the birds pass them by altogether.
The quality of some of this online "content" is dire and cringeworthy rubbish. Where it's done well it is educational and inspiring, funny and captivating. Where it's done in order to monetize a hobby or for personal promotion it's worse than useless. The churn of people creating thumbnails all in capital letters screeching that they are SEARCHING FOR THE RAREST BIRD IN THE UK!!! DO WE FIND IT?!!! before a 4 minute video of their gurning head cuts to footage of a leucistic pheasant and an excited person shouting down the lens with crocodile tears of joy coursing down their cheeks is the worst of it and is what puts us off engaging. It's nothing to do with birding, and is all about self-promotion and driving clicks.
I suppose the takeaway here is this: we have a responsibility to engage with modern media and technology and those who are producing it in order to help pass on fieldcraft worthy of the field. The quality of media will be determined by how we engage with it - if we want powerfully positive media them we have to contribute to it by giving our voices and our approval to the things that are done well. It's easy to make fun, and it's easy to despair of people lost in their screens while out birding, but it's no good moaning about it and then shrugging as though this is just a phase that young people are going through. Phones and social media in birding are here to stay, more toothpaste never going back into the tube. We have to help people to moderate their use of their devices so that they get the benefit of their time in natural spaces, one of which is to wean them off their media addiction. So encourage the video creators where they make good content that drives learning and inspiration, and encourage people to use Merlin and eBird where appropriate in order to learn and record for science, and especially be a role model in the field. After all, those people might reach a thousand times more people each with their videos than I ever will with my writing - they will inspire the next generation of birders and what they inspire in their viewers will have a lasting impact in how people engage with birds in the next ten, twenty or fifty years.
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