A Rationale for Birding
Four fundamental issues may be said to provide the foundation for a rationale for birding. This list of issues is not exhaustive, and I encourage anyone with suggestions for additions to the list to send them along.
First, birds are fascinating to watch and to study. Unlike many other facets of the natural world, birds are highly conspicuous, both visually and aurally, so they lend themselves more easily to our attention than do many other elements of the fauna and flora of the planet. Thus, birds fulfill our needs to satisfy curiosity and to seek knowledge.
Second, birds provide a way of satisfying human aesthetic needs. Birds and the natural habitats in which many of them are found are strikingly beautiful and offer humans a refreshing change from the dreariness and deadness that characterizes much of the superstructure of human civilization. Even the parts of human civilization that are aesthetic, such as human efforts to create art, are arguably less aesthetic than the beauty provided by the world around us, including both its animate and inanimate elements.
Third, birds satisfy our need to feel safe since they are essentially biological litmus paper, providing humans with early warning about environmental changes that might affect us in a negative manner. A famous example is the miner's canary, which, when carried down into mine shafts, would sing until dangerous levels of gases, mainly methane and carbon monoxide, would build up, whereupon the canaries would cease to sing, warning the miners to vacate the mine or to risk death. Another famous example involves the many birds—principally, but not exclusively, raptors—whose breeding biology was disrupted by DDT poisoning. These birds, being more sensitive to DDT poisoning than humans, gave early warning through their population losses that something debilitating was in the environment, and research showed that something to be DDT (which, by the by, is still manufactured in the U.S. and sold abroad, even though it is banned for sale in the U.S.; is this ethical?).
Fourth, birds provide a free service to humanity by keeping insect populations and rodent populations at levels that prevent them from doing catastrophic damage to human food crops. If insect-eating and rodent-eating birds did not control the population levels of these insects and rodents, the loss of crops, though hard to estimate, would undoubtedly be very great, perhaps enough to trigger world-wide famine. The economic value of this free service is very large, surely on the order of tens of billions of dollars per year or greater, just with regard to the crops that would be lost to insects and rodents; the economic value of lives lost to famine is, of course, inestimable. Imagine a world in which insect-eating and rodent-eating birds decided to go on a food strike during the next crop-growing season. Locust plagues would seem insignificant compared to the havoc that would be wrought in the human food production process in such a case.
Given the important contributions--largely ignored by the vast majority of humans to be sure but present nonetheless--of birds to human happiness, it only makes sense that humans should safeguard this important component of the planetary fauna. To this end, many humans undertake surveys of birds (and other wildlife) as a way of keeping tabs on their populations. Without such surveys, the declines in populations of raptors during the DDT era might not have been detected before sufficient DDT was introduced into the biosphere to harm humans on a wide scale; and without such surveys today, we will not be in a position to notice changes in the populations of birds and thus to be warned, yet again, about an impending disaster. So, go forth and count birds, for your own sake as well as theirs; birders who do not contribute to this endeavor do little to bring respect to their activity.
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