Tasmania is another dream destination for birders. That’s a palpable change in community attitude.” Now, locals engage you in conversation about birds. “But now the locals are used to these weirdo bird nerds staying in their town. “In the 90s, you’d get some deeply suspicious looks and occasionally, hostile scowls,” he says.
Bruny Island in Tasmania is a birdwatcher’s paradise. He’s visited the box-ironbark forests of Chiltern-Mt Pilot national park in north-east Victoria for decades, an area known for threatened species such as regent honeyeaters.ĭr Rochelle Steven. Over the years Dooley has witnessed a shift in how birdwatchers are perceived in regional communities. It’s been a real boon for those places that have realised what they’ve got on their doorstep.” Living in a birder’s paradise “Places that harbour threatened, endangered and must-see species, those birds become iconic for those regions. “The market for bird tourism is very knowledgable,” Dooley says. Instead, birdwatching tourism has risen organically – birders know where birds are, and savvy local tourism businesses pick up on it.
Suspicious observer Patch#
“That patch of bush is now worth more to them left standing because they have birders coming to town visiting their coffee shops and pubs.”Īvid birder and author of The Big Twitch, Sean Dooley, who also works for BirdLife Australia, says “there’s hardly ever been any concerted, genuine effort at recognising bird-related tourism”.
“If a community sees the value birdwatching brings to the local economy, that can shift the dialogue and drive policies at a local level,” Steven says. “But we can’t do that for birdwatching as we don’t have those surrogate measures to understand how many people are participating.” “We know how many whale-watching boats there are, how many days they go out and how many people each boat holds, so we can get an indication of the magnitude of whale-watching,” Steven says. “The diversity of habitats and corresponding diversity of birds makes Australia the holy grail for birdwatchers.”īirdwatching was included in the national visitor survey conducted by Tourism Research Australia for the first time in 2019. “For someone from the UK, seeing something as common as a rainbow lorikeet is a huge thrill,” Steven says. Some birdwatchers are crazy and fanatical, but they’re just fantastic people. The report found that bird tourism is a fast-growing niche market and that birders spend more than the average tourist. BirdLife Australia’s Bird and Nature Tourism Report, prepared by Dr Rochelle Steven, a conservation scientist at Murdoch University, uses data from Tourism Research Australia and a survey conducted in 2021. Until recently, quantifying the scale of birdwatching tourism in Australia was tricky due to lack of data. In Birdsville, Bedourie and Boulia we stay in motels and eat in the one pub or restaurant in town each night.” The business of birdwatching “It certainly benefits little towns in the middle of nowhere. For example, when visiting the remote community of Lockhart River in Cape York, Mead’s groups stay in Indigenous-owned accommodation. He says birdwatching brings tourism dollars to small businesses in out-of-the-way places. People will travel a long way to find the palm cockatoo at the top of Cape York.
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