Understanding Place as ‘Home’ and ‘Away’ through Practices of Bird-watching

ABSTRACT

Bird-watching is an increasingly popular leisure activity. Previous research has taken for granted the identity of people who watch birds, often categorised by their level of skilled practice as ‘dude’, ‘birder’ or ‘twitcher’. Feminist geographers encourage us to explore identity work as an outcome of the reciprocal relationships between practices and place. Our feminist approach illustrates that the practices of bird-watching are always much more than categorising birds as species. This paper illustrates how the practices of bird-watching are integral to the making and remaking of sense of place as ‘home’ and ‘away’, to sustain identities beyond accepted categories of ‘dude’, ‘birder’ and ‘twitcher’. The creation and application of different types of ‘bird-lists’ helps to explain the ways in which practices of bird-watching facilitate making sense of place as simultaneously ‘home’, ‘away’ and habitat, as well as the identity work of home-maker, citizen-scientist and tourist. Our insights into these leisure practices of bird-watching are drawn from analysis of data gathered from 21 people who actively bird-watch and reside on the South Coast, New South Wales, Australia by combining research methods of talking, walking, drawing and photography.

KEY WORDS:

• Embodied geographies
• bird-watching
• non-human
• home
• leisure
• practice

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on research undertaken by Carrie Wilkinson as part of her BSc (Hons) degree, supervised by Gordon Waitt and Leah Gibbs. We thank participants who generously gave their time.

Notes

[1] The Michael Morcombe eGuide to the Birds of Australia (Morcombe 2012) is essentially a digitisation of a popular textual field-guide by the same author, but with the addition of audio files of bird-calls. The app provides users with the opportunity to document their own lists of observations, which can then be sorted by date, location or species.

[2] While the objective of this paper is, in part, to do away with the labelling and restrictive categorisation of people who watch birds, in the interests of clarity it is impossible not to discuss and explore an assemblage of practices and subjects without some reference to descriptive terminology. For the purposes of this article we adopt the term bird-watcher to describe anyone who participates in the activity of watching birds. We do not use bird-watcher as a label or hierarchical category; rather, we use bird-watcher interchangeably with the phrase people who watch birds.

[3] ‘Life-list’ is the term given to a list of all of the species a person has encountered and identified in their life, usually with details about the sighting, such as date and location, and whether the bird was identified audibly or visually.

[4] Eremaea Birds, now operating as Eremaea eBird (2014), is a web interface that enables participants to upload and retrieve observation records from lists of birds encountered at a specific location and/or time period.