Subject: Young Birders
Date: Jan 4 14:47:25 1995
From: Charles E. Vaughan - cev at rocket.com


Dennis Paulson wrote:
>From my observations, statistically speaking there are no young birders,

I don't find this surprizing or disturbing. From watching my own kids I
know that children and in turn young people develop interests in observation
progressively. Birding requires motor skills most kids do not possess,
(i.e. handling binoculars) patience that very few kids possess, abstract
rewards, (most kids deal poorly with such abstraction until they are
teenagers) and a huge range of categorization skills that take a very long
time to learn.

Kids don't generally like sight seeing or scenery either. Out of 3
daughters I now have 1 with an interest in birding and 1 more that will
tolerate it and 1 that has no real interest. I suspect that adults exposed
to birding might break much the same way. But there should be no
expectation that young people will gravitate to birding prior to their twenties.

I would be interested in an application of Eugene Hunn's list theory here.
Do the lengths of people's functional lists lengthen as they age?

Charles Vaughan
Woodinville, WA
cev at rocket.com