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December 4, 2020

BIRD CLUBS ON THE MOVE

By Rick Wright

We throw around the word “disaster” easily nowadays, but this pandemic has been more destructive than any other event, natural or artificial, in my lifetime. The loss of well over a million lives worldwide would be staggeringly incomprehensible were those losses not so tragically personal for so many of us. With more than a fifth of the deaths here in the United States, there is no longer anything abstract about this disease and the toll it takes on our friends, our loved ones, on us. 

Not even the most fortunate among us has been unaffected as an individual. And because individuals exist in networks, communities, and cultures, those institutions, too, have been damaged—not just altered, but damaged. The day-to-day connections essential to our understanding of ourselves and our relationships with others were once effortless, but now, acts like a friendly hug or a shared chuckle or even just a smile come freighted with worry; the moment’s hesitation—is it safe? for me? for them?—creates a hiccough of disconnection, as if nothing we do with each other can ever be spontaneous again.

Six months ago, it seemed to many of us that Covid-19 would push many already teetering groups and organizations over the edge. Local and regional bird clubs, to take the obvious example, had been on their last legs for well more than a decade, as memberships dwindled and aged. Surely this would be the end of any organization whose survival was so delicately dependent on those once-a-month meetings in church basements and the bimonthly field trips with the same half a dozen loyalists. In normal times, a cough or a little snow on the roads was more than enough to cancel those events. And times are far from normal.

But then came the surprise. As it became more and more obvious that birding travel would have to be put on hold, we began to turn inward, to the local birding communities that we might not have had quite as much time for in the past. Regular meetings and field trips would be impossible, of course, but the newsletter remained—a venerable technology still faithfully curated by bird club editors, in some cases even in its ancestral form as a paper publication, sent through the mail. Like most club duties and functions, the responsibility of writing for the newsletter traditionally fell to a tiny core of regular contributors.

Setting up an old-style bird club meeting - Sanford M. Sorkin

Now, though, in the time of Covid-19, with so much unwelcome spare time on our quarantined hands, we put pen to paper or pixel to monitor and finally started to produce the stories and articles we’d been carrying in our heads for months and even years, never finding a chance to sit down and just write. Newsletters that had struggled along as two pages or four suddenly found themselves filled to bursting with notes and comments from our friends, whose exciting accounts of past trips and sightings helped us forget the new limits imposed on our own birding. Faced with so new and so welcome an abundance of copy, editors found themselves forced to expand to eight pages and beyond, and to accelerate the schedule of publication; many have now gone from quarterly to bimonthly or even monthly. The concomitant rise in postage costs has encouraged the “migration” (fitting word, that) of even the most hide-bound publications from paper to digital formats.

Digital delivery is essentially free, making it possible to expand at no cost the effective reach of a club newsletter far beyond the dues-paying members. Friends and friends of friends can now read the same materials—and newsletters, delivered for free, are among any bird club’s most powerful recruitment devices.

Once the digital divide was overcome, there was nothing to stop bird clubs from branching out into a wide range of e-communications. Among the most popular genres has been the quiz. In a way, birding has always had the structure of a puzzle, requiring the creative combination of scattered clues to reach an accurate identification. Online publication makes it easy to share full-color images—or, on the part of some especially nefarious quizmasters, small portions of full-color images—for identification tests, and the possibility of linking to books and journals in online libraries helps create challenging and rewarding quizzes on the history and culture of birds and birding. One of the organizations I belong to, northern New Jersey’s Montclair Bird Club, has distributed nearly 60 biweekly quizzes now, some of them easy, some of them hard, all of them informative. Each quiz goes out to nearly 200 birders around the world, a far cry from the fifteen or twenty of the faithful who in more carefree days could be counted on to attend a weekday meeting.

The popularity of those quizzes, all of them now archived on the club’s website, led inevitably to “live” quiz rounds broadcasted on Zoom. I had never heard of Zoom before March of this year, when suddenly it was everywhere. Zoom quizzes, on birds and a hundred thousand other interesting topics, are now being run what seems like twenty-four hours a day, and it is easy to take part in two or three a day originating from clubs and organizations all around the globe, rubbing virtual shoulders with birders from the very same countries we wish we were visiting.

Bird club cookies - Sanford M. Sorkin

And if quizzes work so well on Zoom, why not meetings? The atmosphere is different, and the cookies are sorely missed, but online meetings bring their own advantages with them. The chairs are comfortable, the screen always visible, the volume levels up to you. No one has to worry about driving home in the dark or in bad weather. The elderly and the homebound can attend again, safely and easily. Best of all, just as in the quizzes, there are no geographic bounds. My attendance at the Linnaean Society is unhampered by any need to park on the Upper West Side; I can “go” to events of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club without the two hours of wearying travel to Philadelphia; any meeting of any club anywhere in the world is open to me if I can figure out the time differences and remember to set the alarm clock.

Many of those meetings, wherever they issue from, are even more interesting than they have been in the past. Program chairpeople and club treasurers are canny sorts, and they quickly figured out that honoraria could be increased while money could still be saved: captivating speakers whose reluctance or whose geographical remoteness had stood in the way of their boarding a plane for a grueling and expensive flight are now available virtually, ready to speak from the comfort of their own homes or offices.

There are no silver linings to a global catastrophe like this one. But there are surprises. One of the biggest for me has been the renewal of the bird club. Over these past challenging months, I have often felt that I knew my fellow members better and spent more time with them—even if it is time on line—than back in the lamented days of in-person meetings and excursions. Long deemed antiquated, even moribund, the local bird club may well prove to be the glue that bonds our little communities, the venerable institution that winds up preserving birding and its unique culture through these difficult times and beyond.

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Victor Emanuel Nature Tours  |  2525 Wallingwood Drive, Suite 1003  |  Austin, TX 78746
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