An economic analysis of twitching behaviour and species rarity

ABSTRACT

Avid birdwatchers, or ‘twitchers’, expend a considerable amount of money and time pursuing viewing experiences of rare or vagrant species. By vagrant species, we mean a species found outside its normal range/distribution. To enhance our understanding of this form of behaviour, we present results from a U.K. survey of twitchers. First, we examine the relationship between cost and rarity based on actual viewing experiences. Our statistical results reveal that the relationship between cost and rarity is positive and very inelastic. Second, we present results from a hypothetical Best-Worst Scaling exercise examining aspects of species rarity. We find that rarity is a more nuanced construct than simply the frequency with which a vagrant species has appeared. Our results provide insights into the meaning of rarity, as well as the economic value attach to it and why.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitching
• rarity
• travel cost valuation
• best-worst scaling

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the final support provided by the Eastern ARC Seed Fund that enabled us to undertake our survey design and data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.bbrc.org.uk/

2 Examples in the literature include Mardon and Belk (2018) who consider digital collecting whereas Apostolou (2011) looks at fossilised dinosaur eggs. There is also literature on the experience economy and collecting experiences (Pine, , and Gilmore 1998). Individuals’ also obtain relatively higher satisfaction from experiential versus material consumption (Gilovich, Kumar, and Jampol 2015).

3 Krishna et al. (2019) note that species that are rare in the wild may no longer be valued as highly because the scale of the caged trade has reduced rarity for consumers.

4 Callaghan et al. (2018) reference the film ‘The Big Year’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Year) a comedy about the extremes twitchers go to see rare species. Sheard (1999) compares the pursuit of rare birds to that of a competition.

5 The survey instrument is provided in an appendix to this paper.

6 https://www.rarebirdalert.co.uk/v2/Content/index.aspx and https://www.birdguides.com/news/major-online-survey-launched-to-assess-the-economics-of-rarity-in-bir/

7 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/householddisposableincomeandinequality/yearending2018

8 We employed Route Calculator: https://routecalculator.co.uk/

9 We do not impute the value associated with the travel experience or opportunity cost of time. Kolstoe and Cameron (2017) note that value of travel time is typically imputed to be one-third of the average wage.

10 https://www.bbrc.org.uk/main-information/statistics

11 https://www.bou.org.uk/british-list/

12 https://www.birdguides.com/articles/western-palearctic/rare-western-palearctic-birds-azure-tit/

13 For details on the Orthoplan command in SPSS, see: http://www.spss.com.hk/software/statistics/conjoint/.

14 For both TCM specifications, we considered the Ramsey RESET test as well as heteroscedasticity. Our model specifications pass the RESET test. When correcting for heteroscedasticity, the results remained unchanged. The additional model specifications estimated as robustness checks are provided in the Appendix.

15 https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/bird-watching/valuing-birds.php (Access to US Fish & Wildlife Survey Report)

16 See for details: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/wildlife-and-the-law/wildlife-and-countryside-act/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Universities of Kent, Essex and UEA.