Subject: Economic impact of birding
Date: Nov 2 15:18:38 1998
From: "Kelly Cassidy" - lostriver at seanet.com


Birders occasionally tout the economic impact of birding as a way of making
friends and influencing politicians. I am skeptical that birders have much
of an economic impact, and even more skeptical that having an economic
impact is a desirable thing.

Picture the average day visitor to the La Conner area during the Tulip
festival period in spring. A nice family activity, so let's bring along the
two kids. Mom, dad, and the kids tootle up to La Conner in the minivan.
They stop at a tulip farm, buy a couple of lattes and couple of hot
chocolates for the kids ($8), admire the tulips, and purchase a bunch of
bulbs, for an average of (wild guess, here), say $30. By now, the kids are
getting bored and cranky, and mom and dad want to get more out of an 80-mile
drive than a bunch of bulbs, so they head for La Conner. They eat lunch
($25), buy the kids a couple of T-shirts ($20), buy a picture of tulips or
some other trinket ($15), and a couple of ice cream cones for the kids, who
are getting really whiny by now ($3). They head back home, having spent
roughly $100 in and around La Conner.

Contrast that with the average day birding trip to see the birds wintering
in the tulip fields. The average birder is at the age where the kids have
been shown the door and maybe the income is fixed. Mr. Birder frugally
gasses up his 10-year old cheap sedan before leaving Seattle, knowing gas
will be more expensive in boonies. He packs a lunch and a thermos of
coffee, since he never knows where he'll be around lunch time. Mr. Birder
drives into La Conner, feeling the urge to use the restroom after all that
coffee. He finds a gas station and buys a cup of coffee ($0.70), so as not
to feel guilty about using the restroom. Oh, what the heck, he's a
Seattlite; he'll buy a latte and one of those donuts instead ($2.50).
After a leisurely day of scanning the fields and blocking traffic on narrow
roads in the Skagit Flats, he makes another pit-stop in La Conner, and picks
up a Coke and bag of Doritos ($1.50). He's spent about $4.00 in and around
La Conner.

Question: Which tourists would you want if you were a La Conner
businessman?

Aha, you say, what about those expensive binoculars and that spotting
scope? That's a major economic outlay. Let's say the average birder owns a
$300 pair of binoculars and a $400 scope. Assuming the birder (unlike this
birder) avoids dropping the binos into too many creeks or down too many
rocky slopes, the binoculars probably get used for 10 years and the scope
for maybe 20 years. On an annual basis, that's about $50 for the optics.
Birders eventually feel the need to acquire every useful field guide, so
maybe Mr. Birder buys 3 or 4 books a year, too ($100); maybe he's a real
fanatic and has a membership in WOS ($20/year).

Compared to the typical trip to the local mall by the average teenager,
an outing to a professional football game, or even to the video store for
two or three movies per week, birding does not seem like a hobby that pumps
a lot of money into the economy. The major expense is for gas to drive to
good birding spots. The "wildlife watching" statistics evidently include
anyone who buys bird seed. Bird feeding has the intangible benefit of
making people aware of wildlife, but, on the whole, it's probably
detrimental to native birds, and most birders don't consider it "birding,"
anyway.

The other thing about those statistics that bugs me is the idea that
birding *should* have a big economic impact. As a quick and dirty rule
(with lots of qualifications), economic outlay is roughly proportional to
resources used. Birding is generally a low-impact, low-resource method of
entertainment.

As it should be!

Kelly Cassidy