Birding is having a moment right now. Roughly three in 10 people in the U.S. get out their binoculars and participate in the pastime in some way, according to a recent survey shared by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And it’s a big moneymaker, with birders spending more than a hundred billion dollars on trips, cameras and birdhouses in 2022.
A new birding festival in Wyoming is tapping into that momentum. Late this May, the Jackson Hole Birding Festival brought people from all over the country to the area for three days of tours, talks and tanagers. The festival was started by two bird enthusiasts and filmmakers from Pittsburg and is now in its second year.
One group of birders spent the afternoon looking for woodpeckers in a burn zone outside Bondurant, as local Sublette County birder Walter Wehtje shared his insights on how prescribed burns and wildfires have impacted the local flora and fauna.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann tagged along on the windy hike to get an inside look into the hearts and minds of birding enthusiasts.
For 21 year old Keelin Pritchard, birding is a great way of taking a break from an increasingly digital world.
“I feel like a lot of people my age are just inside and moping,” she said. “Like, go out and hike. You don't even have to get into birding, just go out and be like, ‘Oh, cool!’ Just get out in nature.”
Pritchard is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and said she’s often the youngest birder in any crowd.
“I’ve been sick of sitting and scrolling on my phone, and connecting with nature just really brings you back to reality of like, ‘Wow, that little thing that somebody said to me, it does not matter,’” she said.
She’s at her first-ever festival with her aunt Kerrie Lagon, who showed Pritchard the birding ropes when she was 13.
“My all-time favorite bird is the black-billed magpie. They're in the corvus family,” she said. “They're very mischievous. They're black, white and this bluish teal, and they are just so funny to watch. They're like a crow, but prettier.”
The group walked up a hill on a dirt two-track coming up off the highway, stopping to watch a sharp-shinned hawk flying against a blue sky with the Gros Ventre Mountains in the distance.
Zia Zybko is also a newcomer to the birding festival scene, coming in with a background in landscape architecture and a passion for native plants.
“This is my first one, and what I love about it is it's so small and intimate,” she said. “I feel like I was nervous that people would be like, ‘Well, that's a whatever, da-da-da-da scientific name,’ and I'd be like, ‘Ah?,’ because sometimes plant people do that. But everybody's been friendly and just sharing their love of birds.”
Zybko is decked out in a sunshirt and binoculars. She came up from Fort Collins, Colorado with her friend Kimberly Schug.
“We have stunning scenery too, but – oh! There was just a big yellow bird,” said Zybko, laughing. “Someone saw it and someone knows what it is.”
Schug found the Jackson Hole Birding Festival online and thought it’d be a great fit for a trip, with a beautiful location and not too long of a drive up from Colorado.
“Zia is a poet. I found a nice little cabin at Trail Creek Ranch and thought maybe she'd like to sit on the porch and write her poetry,” said Schug. “She said, ‘I don't want to just sit. I want to go with you!’ So we signed her up too and it's really fun to have her along.”
Schug described herself as a “casual” birder, and said she’s not one to worry about finding rare birds or keeping track of any numbers.
“The most beautiful part of birding for me is actually getting to know the birds right around me, their behavior, where they live, what they do in the spring, what they do in the fall, who shows up next,’ said Schug. “Just start looking.”
For Zybko, birding is all about fostering a love for other beings beyond herself.
“The natural world is magical and these other creatures that we share the world with, they have their own lives and they're so beautiful,” she said. “Yesterday I saw a little sparrow making her nest, and it just filled my heart with so much joy because I want to share the world with these other creatures. It would be boring without them, and we'd lose something.”
Denver Holt is the founder of the Owl Research Institute up in Charlo, Montana, and was one of the keynote speakers for the festival.
The nonprofit conducts long-term research on owls, their prey and their habitats, and uses its data to help support healthy populations of owls in Montana and Alaska.
“At least in our area, it seems like [snowy owl populations] are trending downward for the last 10 years, [for] reasons I'm not sure of,” said Holt. “But they do follow lemming population cycles or population fluctuations, so whatever happens with lemmings will affect the snowy owls.”
Throughout the years, Holt’s research has been featured in outlets like BBC, PBS and National Geographic, and he’s been involved in the birding guiding business for decades.
“I’ve guided for the biggest nature tour company in the world out of Austin, Texas, and it's an enormous industry,” he said. “It's kind of a benign industry in the sense, [with] that low impact on the environment [and] lots of people and interest not just in bird watching but also conservation.”
Holt said in 50 years, his hope is that there are still landscapes and habitats that have been conserved, where people can go birding and critters can live in healthy ecosystems.
Bondurant local Walter Wehtje echoed Holt’s sentiment about getting people involved in habitat conservation.
“If people have a better understanding of how natural systems work and how forest management can lower fire risks or improve wildlife habitat conditions, I think that [they] ... can maybe contribute or at least be aware of what's going on, and maybe in some small way affect how our lands are managed,” he said.
Wehtje was the group’s guide for the afternoon, sharing his thoughts on the role of prescribed fires on the landscape and leading the search for the elusive black-backed woodpecker. As the crew tromped through the woods, Wehtje pointed out chipping sparrows and western tanagers, as well as peeled bark: a tell-tale sign of woodpecker activity.
“The black-backed woodpecker especially is drawn to areas that have burned recently,” he said. “And so since that is a generally a rare habitat – there's a great blue heron flying in front of us! Since that's a rare habitat, it's a bird that is often not seen, and people want to see it because birders like to see new birds.”
From Wehtje’s perspective, hikes like these are an opportunity to talk about the bigger picture of what’s happening in the ecosystem. Aspens are a crucial part of that rare habitat loved by many woodpecker species, but aspens get shaded out by other taller tree species in landscapes that haven’t seen fire over long periods of time.
One solution is reintroducing fire to the landscape on a shorter time interval, using intentional prescribed burning techniques.
“It's a very big challenge to create a fire like this in the West for both political, economic and ecological reasons,” said Wehtje.
For Jackson Hole Birding Festival co-founder Melissa Rohm, getting birds on more peoples’ radars was a big inspiration for planning the event in the first place.
“Birds need more attention out here,” she said. “Everyone loves to see the big mammals, but the birds are just as amazing, and we want to bring attention to the birds and the conservation issues that they're facing.”
Decked out in a bird-patterned shirt and baseball hat, Rohm said the creatures are getting squeezed by pressures from a bunch of different angles.
“Raptors especially face multiple threats from development, their prey species declining, their habitat changing,” she said. “Even lead poisoning is a big issue for raptors. Insects all over the world are in decline, and that in turn affects many, many songbirds and even some small raptors like kestrels.”
For her husband and fellow co-founder Dave Rohm, hosting the festival in Jackson was a no-brainer, after the two had visited the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem for years and years.
“Our [festival] saying is ‘Bird Wild,’ because you get the birds and you get the wild,” he said. “There isn't really any other place like this. People were looking at a moose today, and then a western tanager, and then a Bullock's oriole, and a black bear. It's just a special place.”
Rohm said the festival saw about 167 participants in its first year and about 160 this go-around, which he attributed to this year’s more challenging economic landscape. But the plan is to keep the birding going.
“We're not going anywhere. We'll do it as long as we can,” he said. “It's not so much about the numbers for us. It's never gonna be an 1,100 people festival.”
Sisters Valerie Cheshire and Patti Galli are no strangers to birding festivals, although they do take different approaches to the experience.
Cheshire calls herself a “friend of a birder” and makes sure her crew enjoys the sights and scenery of wherever they end up traveling.
“I help them remember that there's other things,” she said, laughing. “Like, ‘Look how pretty the mountains are! And look, there's the ocean! And look, there's good restaurants we can go to as well!’”
Meanwhile, Galli is one of Denver Audubon's master birders. And yes, that’s an official title.
“I got a certificate, I took a year-long intense class, I've led field trips, I've given speeches, I've done the whole thing,” she said. “Festivals, you name it, I've done a little bit of everything.”
Galli caught the birding bug when she finally moved into a house after living for many years in apartments.
“My bedroom was in the back of the backyard and there were trees galore,” she said. “I saw my first bird, or spark bird, which was a blue jay, and that's what did it for me. After that, I was hooked!”
Galli said she loved how gregarious the blue jay was and headed to the library to figure out what it was. That’s when she found books filled with hundreds of birds and realized she wanted to find a way to see them all.
“There's still birds on my bucket list, but my favorite bird is the bird that I see at the moment. All of a sudden, that's exciting, ” she said. “And then I'm always looking for the next bird, the next festival, the next habitat, the next state to go and bird in.”
As for what keeps Galli coming back, over and over again?
“Birds are really interesting. They're exciting. Each of them can do something different, and so I think we marvel at that all the time,” she said. “Now, when we see that our birds are in trouble, it's really important that our conservation, our education is top of the list.”
