Birding Ethics
Is respecting private property too much to ask?
(Listen to the radio version here.)
On October 19, a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher showed up on a farm north of Duluth and stuck around for over a week—according to eBird, the last sighting was on October 27. It spent most of its time near cows fenced in far off the road, flycatching and perching on the fence and atop several trees. From the road, it was very tiny; some birders searched as long as an hour before locating it, but once we saw it, it was easy to identify and to take identifiable photos.
When the bird was first found, a birder talked to the property owner who said it was fine for people to look at it from the road, but that for several reasons, he didn’t want people walking onto his land for closer looks. Respecting people’s property rights and not trespassing are no-brainers and obvious legal issues, also clearly codified in the American Birding Association’s Code of Birding Ethics: “Never enter private property without the landowner’s permission.”
Sure, I’d have preferred it if the bird flew right up to us and sat on a shrub 10 feet away—this is one of the most gorgeous birds on the planet—but seeing it at a distance was the only option.
A lot of birders descended on the spot, and for the most part everyone stayed on the road. But last week, three birders brazenly walked all the way through the field up to the fence, both trespassing and spooking the cattle.
It’s mortifying for me when birders violate the law, much less basic ethics, to get a better look at a rare bird—it gives all of us a bad reputation and can make people justifiably reluctant to report any rare birds on their property. Almost always, the people approaching too closely aren’t just birding—they’re photographers.
A lot of my photos have been published in magazines; on government, educational, and non-profit websites and publications; and in books including my own National Geographic Pocket Guide to the Birds of North America. (Well, they only used one, but that sort of qualifies me as a National Geographic photographer, right?)
I’m especially thrilled when I can get close enough to capture important, hard-to-see details…
…or get a photo that displays a bird’s stunning beauty.
I take pride in being an ethical photographer, respecting both property owners and the bird itself, so I do my best not to approach closer than a bird seems comfortable with. But never has any publication using my work asked me if my photos were taken ethically. Without that, professional photographers can have a financial incentive to get great photos regardless of the ethical costs.
My ethics are hardly perfect, and there are gray areas. Indeed, I got an anonymous email after I saw the very last bird I added to my Continental US and Canada list, the young flamingo I saw in Florida this month. It was at the end of a long bridge on the causeway to Fred Howard Park in Pinellas County.
It was standing in shallow water right next to the highway, but what caught my eye as we drove along wasn’t the flamingo but a flock of Black Skimmers and Royal Terns loafing on the nearby sandy shore. When we pulled over and got out of the car, none of the birds flushed or even looked toward us—they’re clearly accustomed to human bustle. Indeed, during the time we were there, 8 or 10 other cars pulled over, some on our side and some on the other side of the road, and people jumped out to look at dolphins, large fish, and other non-birds. We didn’t see any other birders though I’d learned about this flamingo on eBird.
After watching the flamingo for about 10 minutes in light drizzle, the rain started in earnest, so Russ repositioned the car so Joe and I could take pictures out the windows for another 10 minutes or so. None of the birds seemed disturbed by our presence at all.
The unsigned email I got said this:
Please do not post location of this immature flamingo. This only hurts the natural foraging instincts of this very young bird when precise locations are given out, resulting in multiple people crowding in for various photography shots, causing flushing which we have observed with other local flamingoes. This is the reason most flamingoes have left the area.
I don’t divulge the locations of a lot of rare birds because of fears of disturbing them, and the flamingoes that appeared in Florida and so many other states this fall arrived after Hurricane Idalia—they obviously deserved some peace and quiet after their exhausting journeys. I’m sure that birders approaching too close disturbed many of these poor, depleted birds.
But we can’t expect vagrants to stick around long after they get their bearings, especially in marginal habitat along busy causeways. I felt certain that this one would eventually move on to a safer place, and meanwhile, posting about it didn’t seem problematic since it seemed so comfortable with traffic and human activity.
(I do confess that I’d have been more open to discussing the matter and having my mind changed had the person signed their name. I’m afraid I don’t engage much with anonymous people.)
Outside of breaking the law by trespassing, birding ethics aren’t black and white. I try to err on the side of caution, but I’m sure I’ve crossed some lines over the years. And the vast majority of birders really are ethical. When a Rufous Hummingbird showed up in my yard in November 2021, during the pandemic, birders were asked to stay outside the gate and to not block my driveway or my neighbors’—everyone was very respectful of those rules.
Indeed, the one person who was criticized for being unethical regarding that bird was me—a local photographer chastised me publicly for posting about her, thinking so many gawkers must be stressing her out. But she was coming to my feeders by choice, with good alternatives—she was also visiting two nearby feeding stations without birders. She left in early afternoon on December 4, a very mild day, after the wind shifted from south to northwest. I hope those tailwinds carried her safely to a balmier location.
We’re all of us muddling through life, most of us trying to be good people. When it comes to birding ethics, I guess that’s all there really is to say about it.
