> Birdwatchers No Featherweights in Contributions to Economy
Sorry to keep harping on this, but the numbers in this report are
completely bizarre and suspect. As an example, their figures indicate
that something like 7.5% of the adult population of the US travels to
go birding. Taking the total $ expenditures shown and applying this to
the traveling birders gives you something like this:
20,000,000 people spent around $600 a year on birding-related travel.
20,000,000 people spent around $1,200 a year on birding-related gear.
I think they mean to apply the figures to all 48,000,000 birders as
bird seed is included but, even still, that gives you fairly high
figures.
Just as a final point on how completely unrealistic these numbers are
- the tables show that 10% of the population of Hawaii (the state as a
whole) participate in birding. Hmmmm. I lived in the islands for seven
years and ran into a local birder. Once. I ran into tour groups every
few months when I lived directly across from one of the better remnant
wetlands on O'ahu. (They had to park in front of my front door - it
was pretty easy to spot the tours. Most of the participants were
general interest tourists. I think I ran into a mainland-based tour
group only once.) At the Christmas Bird Count (an enormously big deal
in the US) you would be lucky to have 10 people show up. That's a
once-a-year event on an island with a population of about 875,000
people. I guess of the 10% that are birders (87,500) - 874,990 were
busy every year on that day.
Realistically, people from Hawaii almost never become birders because
there's no reason for them to become interested. They have a handful
of introduced birds (a dozen or so) at sea-level and one major annual
migrant. People live their entire lives in the islands without ever
seeing more - it's generally hard and expensive to do as you have to
get higher up on the taller islands to see native birds. In any case,
a figure like 10% participation in Hawaii should never have passed the
sniff test at NPWS when they were calculating the figures for this
report.
There's no indication of how the sample was selected for the survey -
unless I missed it. Was this a randomized sample or did they get
people who were at NPWS facilities to participate? You would get a
pretty distorted result if the later were the case. [Later] They used
a randomized sample - the details are at the back of the full report:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/fhw06-nat.pdf
The US Census is pretty great at what they do - so I haven't a clue at
how they would get this as wrong as it seems to be. [Later] One
thought, this report covers hunters, fishermen, and wildlife-watchers
into one. If you're out hunting or fishing, you're likely to look at
birds at the same time (even if you're not hunting birds.) As far as I
can tell from a quick look, you spent a day away from home
"birdwatching" if you went deer hunting and looked at birds. That
would explain the distortion. For Hawaii, fishing and noticing a bird
might work the same way - recreational fishing there is about as
popular as it is here. It would be more interesting to get numbers
about "days spent away from home for the purpose of looking at birds
while not otherwise busy trying to kill things ;-) I didn't find (from
a quick look) the original survey questionnaires (they may not be
published on-line - interviews were done on the phone or in person) so
I can't say if my guess is right or not.
Again, my only useful point is that these numbers are so obviously and
badly wrong that they're unlikely to persuade anyone in authority. It
doesn't take much to convince people that there are a lot of
recreational fisherfolk about - they're highly visible and make an
obvious economic impact. Trying to convince government people that
there are some meaningful number of birders when they're basically
invisible just doesn't seem likely to work. Better, I'd think, is to
focus on those kinds of specialized situations where birding can be a
real, specific, and meaningful draw.
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