At 09:48 AM 3/11/2004 +1100, you wrote:
On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 08:01:41AM +1100, Lorne Johnson wrote:
> I was birding with Keith Brandwood in western Sydney a while back and
> he mentioned that not many people in Australia go birding. I agreed with
> him. I was then thinking about just how many people do bird in this
> country. Would anyone out there have a rough idea? I know it's a hard
> thing to estimate.
There are said to 2 million birdwatchers among the UK's 60 million people.
If birdwatching were as popular here, there would be 700,000 bird watchers
among 20 million Australian. If you assume birdwatching is less popular
here, you have an upper bound. The size of the membership of Birds
Australia (about 10,000?) is a very conservative lower bound. The number
of copies of field guides such Pizzey&Knight sold would be interesting
Andrew Taylor
-
Hi Andrew and all others
I think one of the hardest things is to define just what is a "birdwatcher"
before you
start to count them. There is, of course, a wide spectrum from the
professionals to
those people who enjoy the birds in their garden.
I think that the only reasonable way to compare countries/states/cities is
to use
MEMBERSHIP in the various birdwatching/ornithological clubs, societies and
organisations.
This means that across the different countries we a looking at a similar
group of people
who are prepared to PAY an annual subscription to support and be associated
with
other birdwatchers.
Their motivation may vary from simple backyard birding to serious twitching
to conservation to scientific research but their common denominator is that
they
are putting up some money towards that activity. Of course, some keen
birders are members
of more than one organisation and some keen (?) birders may be members of
no organisation
- but that is also going to occur overseas as well.
If we can agree on this definition, then comparisons between the various
countries can be made.
I don't know what is the current membership of BA and BOCA but Peter Crow
put up the
numbers for Birds Queensland and I'm sure that other members of birding-aus
would have
the figures for other organisations, If these were posted up, even as
rough estimates, then
we could directly compare these with figures from other places.
I think that I have heard that membership of the RSPB in the UK is over 1
million If there
was a similar proportion of birdwatchers here, we would be looking at a
membership of over
300 000. I doubt if there is anything like this but I'd like to see some
figures.
Peter Woodall
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