Birding Is a Booming Hobby—and a Big Business

Before the Biggest Week in American Birding festival launched 15 years ago, many hotels, restaurants, and ice cream shops on northwest Ohio’s Lake Erie shores didn’t open until late June, when the rush of summertime lake visitors arrived. Now, many tourist businesses open at least a month earlier, in May, to welcome droves of birders eager to observe colorful warblers at the tail-end of their own travel.

Lately, business is booming. During a six week period of spring migration in 2024, about 70,000 people visited one of the festival’s central locations, Magee Marsh Wildlife Area. Based on visitor surveys, festival cofounder Kimberly Kaufman estimates birders spent roughly $53 million in the region—up from $37 million in 2013, the year the most recent formal analysis was conducted. “The impact on small businesses has been tremendous,” says Kaufman, who is also executive director of Black Swamp Bird Observatory.

Birding is a growing hobby nationwide, especially since the pandemic—and as in Ohio, U.S. birders are an impressive economic force, according to the latest federal data.

A November 2024 report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) reflects staggering numbers: There are an estimated 96 million birders in the United States—more than a third of U.S. adults—who together spent more than $107 billion in 2022. In total, that’s more money than the 2022 gross domestic product of New Hampshire (and 10 other U.S. states). Those dollars purchased equipment such as binoculars, feeders, and cameras, funded hobby-related trips, and covered other costs large and small, such as plant purchases, subscriptions, field guides, and campers. They also supported 1.4 million jobs and generated billions more in local, state, and federal tax revenue. 

The magnitude of those tallies, which includes people who maintain at-home bird baths or feeders as well as those who travel near and far to see waxwings and woodpeckers, surprised even experts. “I was expecting to see expenditures in the billions, but did not expect it to amount to more than $100 billion,” says Tobias Schwoerer, an applied economist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In a separate study, he and his coauthor, former Audubon Alaska executive director Natalie Dawson, found that birders spent nearly $400 million a year and supported thousands of jobs in Alaska alone.

Such figures are evidence of birders’ immense collective economic sway and political power. Under the right conditions, he says, their dollars can be a major boost for rural areas and conservation efforts alike. “The local impact on communities, especially the remote ones, can be very large if it’s set up in a way that the dollars spent stay in the places they visit,” Schwoerer says. “If [birders] are cognizant of that, they can create some change.” 

The recent data comes from a 2022 national survey about wildlife-associated recreation, including fishing, hunting, birding, and other wildlife watching activities. In November, the agency released a deep dive into the birding-specific data, which extrapolated national estimates based on input from 106,000 respondents over age 16 and 56,000 detailed interviews. Anyone who reported closely observing birds with intention—incidentally running into a pigeon during your commute didn't count, for instance—was marked as a birder for the survey’s purposes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the report found that birders skew older with an average age of 49 years old, and that three-quarters are white. However, it also found that birding is popular across racial, ethnic, and generational lines. More than a quarter of Black Americans and more than a third of Hispanic Americans report watching birds at or away from home. Asian Americans report the highest participation rate of any group, with nearly half identifying as birders. About 30 percent of young people ages 16 to 34 take part, too.

While FWS has conducted similar surveys periodically since 1955, the agency says the latest data can’t be compared to past results due to recent changes in survey methods. But by all accounts, the stats seem to reflect an increasingly vibrant hobby: The pandemic lockdowns spurred a birding boom that’s stuck, particularly among teens and younger adults. For many, paying attention to the seasonal cycles of birds and nature offer an easy and accessible digital detox—and a mental health boost.

Audubon on Campus, a national program that empowers college students to pursue birding and conservation, has, for example, gone from a dozen student-founded and -led campus chapters to 92 in about six years, says program manager Gustavo Figueroa. This total includes chapters in multiple historically Black colleges and universities as well as other minority serving institutions, he notes. Figueroa increasingly sees white retirees mentoring young birders and conservationists of color, building bridges of insight and expertise across demographic divides.

While birders young and old are an economic force, it’s important to remember that newcomers to the hobby can start without buying anything. Watching birds is free and many public parks and birding groups offer no-cost walks and educational programs. But as their interest grows, some make purchases like birdseed or binoculars. Especially enthusiastic hobbyists (who can afford it) may shell out for major trips.

In Alaska, according to Schwoerer’s study, birders are more likely than other tourists to trek to remote areas. If they are mindful to hire local guides and businesses, they offer isolated rural and Indigenous communities a sustainable economic boost while leaving behind a relatively small environmental footprint. For example, on St. Paul Island—a remote outpost in the middle of the Bering Sea—the area’s 400 year-round residents have struggled economically as commercial fisheries have declined, but the community has successfully courted birders to help fill the gap.

All of this spending from wildlife enthusiasts, whether they bird or hunt or fish or all of the above, can help fund conservation directly. Fees paid to enter refuges and parks, purchase hunting and fishing licenses, buy duck stamps have a direct impact. But the simple act of tallying up birders’ collective spending can also create conservation incentives. 

That’s proved true in Ohio. For more than a decade, Kaufman at Black Swamp Bird Observatory has actively promoted the economic footprint of bird tourism, seeking “a foot in the door” for conversations about bird conservation with corporations, elected officials, and community leaders.  “That vision is coming to fruition,” she says.

Today, many of Toledo’s buildings owners participate in a Lights Out program to protect avian migrants from collisions and some are also paying for features such as bird-safe glass. In one big win, the Maumee Bay Lodge, the lakeside conference center that hosts the Biggest Week festival and poses a notable collision danger, recently allocated $70,000 to bird safety improvements.

The example is a clear indicator of just how much leverage wildlife lovers have at their disposal. “Birders are powerful,” says Figueroa. “The birding community—aside from just buying seeds and binoculars—they have a voice.” He hopes the statistics provided by FWS will serve as a tool to amplify the message.