Great-Knot

Great-Knot-Sanbanze

  

Why Birds Lists?

 

Nature organizations are the single most important force driving the conservation movement in North America and Europe, and increasingly in developing countries as well. Nature organizations may differ greatly in their objectives: Some organizations bring people together who love to study and enjoy nature, such as bird organizations, like the Royal Society for the protection of Birds in the UK, Vogelbescherming in the Netherlands, the Sociedad Española de Ornitología, the Naturschutz Bund Deutschland, different Ornithologische Vereinigungen in Deutschland, Audubon Society and the Sierra Club in the USA, lots of botanical societies all over the world, etc. Given the passion of their members, most of these organizations promote nature conservation in a variety of ways, like organizing field trips, promoting love and concern for nature through educational programmes and through political lobbying. 

Other organizations promote concern for conservation of nature or of the environment in general. However, the European and North-American conservation experience has taught us, that the larger conservation organizations are those that promote active enjoyment of nature and that help nature friends to go into the field and build friendships among each other. Among the nature friends, we see that birdwatchers often are the most active and enthusiastic people to go out into nature. Birders keep their own lifetime lists of birds and jointly they maintain bird lists for regions and countries. That is why I started thinking about catering to the interest of birdwatchers when I wanted to design a conservation website in 1997.

Birdwatchers in the developed world are also some of the most active travelers to developing countries to expand their own bird list and to get to know completely different avifaunas of countries far away from their homes. When traveling to another country to go birding, these birdwatchers love to have access to the birds list of the country of their visit. In many cases, it also is very difficult for them to find the national parks and nature reserves where they can go on a birding. Travel to developing countries requires proper preparation and it is difficult to find the really good places, like birding hotspots, great areas for trekking, backpacking, rafting, canoeing, biking and other forms of ecotourism.  

In developing countries, we see a dramatic problem that there are many national parks and nature reserves that are under appreciated. Many of them hardly ever are visited, because there is little information about them, even less information on how to get to them and where to stay once you know that they exist. This leads to the situation that local populations see little benefit in the conservation coming from those protected areas. In Africa, the protected areas are the few places left with abundant wildlife and poachers like to go in and hunt the protected animals. In many countries, landless farmers settle in protected areas and cut themselves a little farm field from the forest. Worldwide, we have seen that visitation of protected areas - ecotourism - is one of the most effective ways to promote acceptance of and respect for protected areas among local inhabitants, as ecotourism creates employment.