No such Thing as Bad Birding Weather, but Depends on Personal Experience

Abstract

Weather importantly affects leisure, especially outdoor activities, like birding, which can be recognized as serious leisure. Outdoor attractive and feasible activities throughout the year, also in adverse weather conditions, are extremely sought after by therapists and leisure organizers. Then, we asked 388 Polish birders how their activity was related to weather and then analyzed how experience, age and gender may modify birding behavior. As might be predicted, more advanced birders not only ignored bad weather but also enjoyed observations during storms and other bad weather events. We discuss how teaching birding and making this activity are potentially useable for leisure organizations, and they may recommend birding places as available also during bad weather. Obviously, our study has limits: a correlational character and the results were obtained in the temperate zone of Europe, and the situation in other places in the globe may look much different.

Keywords:

• birding
• mental health
• motivation
• outdoor activity
• questionnaires
• weather

Acknowledgements

We thank Naomi Steller for help with the online survey, and Dr. Marcin Górniak and Prof. Tim Sparks for discussion on weather, birds and psychiatry and many valuable comments. The manuscript was substantially improved due suggestions by two referees and the editor.