Spring chickens

Michael Plauche sits outside with his 5-year-old son, Gus, watching the bird feeder intently. His ears are attuned to the symphony of nature around his Brevard, N.C., home. Nearby, a hermit thrush sings an ethereal song. Plauche points out to his son the muted colors of the female robin sitting pensively on a branch. Teaching slight differences or distinct details in birds doesn’t just help his son develop into a future bird watcher. Plauche also uses it as an avenue for bigger life lessons. He wants Gus to appreciate nature and find the extraordinary among the ordinary.

At 48, Plauche is not what most people think of as the typical birding hobbyist. He developed a passion for birding in 2005 when the ivory-billed woodpecker, a species that had its last documented sighting in 1944, was rumored to have been rediscovered in Arkansas. Plauche was one of the many caught up in the frenzy of finding North America’s second-­largest woodpecker.

While he didn’t find that bird, the search opened his eyes to a world around him that he had occupied but never really observed.

“You know it makes the world a lot more magical to know that stuff is around,” he said, adding that bird watching is a good excuse to get out and appreciate nature. It also doesn’t require much: Just sitting in the backyard watching native birds qualifies someone as a birder, Plauche said.

Because it’s simple to start, many new birders are taking up the hobby. And they’re getting younger.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology saw record numbers of new users in 2025 on the two apps it maintains. Merlin, a bird identification app for beginners, grew by 9.6 million users in 2025, while ebird.org, a citizen scientist database for birds, saw 140,000 new users. And according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the average age of the 91 million American birders now stands at 49, down from 53 in 2011.

Most start the hobby by looking out their kitchen window or sitting on their patio and noticing a feathered friend nearby. An inexpensive field guide can help identify native species and their various traits. But technology also helps new users find what they’re looking for—and identify it.

Apps like Merlin can identify birds by song, but it’s not without problems. Misidentification is common, and because eBird provides one of the main data sources for conservation decisions in ornithology, Plauche encourages new birders to not make casual observations, but to pay attention and study particulars about habitat and behavior.

“I think it’s a great tool; you just don’t want to let it do your birding for you,” he said.

While local birding is relatively cheap and easy, many birders are extending their searches farther from home. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), birders spent $107.6 billion on the hobby, $93 billion of that on equipment such as binoculars and cameras and $14 billion on travel. Birdwatching tourism brings economic benefits to towns such as Decatur, Ala., where every January the city hosts a festival to promote viewing the more than 20,000 sandhill cranes that winter in Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge.

Danielle Gibson, president of Decatur Morgan County Tourism, called the festival a rare opportunity to witness the cranes in their natural habitat. About 5,000 people flock to the refuge for the festival each year.

Michael Birnbaum of Marietta, Ga., visited Wheeler during this year’s migration. “I can still hear the loud rattling bugle calls of thousands of sandhill cranes,” he said.

Birnbaum has been a hobbyist birder since his retirement from the biomedical field in 2006. Teaching people how to spot and photograph birds is Birnbaum’s passion, and he especially loves to see younger people become interested in the hobby. To help beginning birders, he compiled a chart containing the 50 most common bird sightings in his community. He hands them out regularly to both children and adults in his neighborhood.

In addition to being the neighborhood bird guy, he also leads nature walks and teaches classes through a local nature photography association. Years ago, his groups consisted only of senior citizens, but now it’s normal to have middle-aged and young adults participate.

Michael Plauche says sharing the passion for birding with younger generations has another benefit. Ecological problems are causing many species of birds to decline, according to the U.S. North American Bird Conservation Initiative. Loss of habitat including grasslands and forests has put a third of all bird species at a “tipping point,” meaning they have lost half of their population in the last 50 years, according to the group’s 2025 report. Plauche says recognizing bird species and their ecological homes helps people understand the importance of conservation efforts. It also points them to the Creator.

“There’s so many different ways to do it and approaches to it,” Plauche says of birding. “What I always tell people is to do it as much or as little as you like and let it enrich your life that much.”