Alan Zerbe, of Harrisburg, said he hadn’t a clue that “feeding the birds in my backyard would be so expensive.”
During home confinement in the height of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year he decided his family could use a new hobby and jumped onto his Amazon account.
“I hit $100 in just a few clicks,” he recalled. “And, after it all got here and I got it put up in the backyard, in a couple days I saw that a 20-pound bag of sunflower seeds does not last very long.”
Zerbe switched to the more economical 50-pound bags and now, several of those bags later, his list of yard birds – the birder’s term for birds seen in the backyard – now includes 17 species.
“We had to find some online sites to help us identify some of them,” he noted.
Downloads of online bird-identification apps are up by orders of magnitude. Two of the most popular apps, the National Audubon Society’s Mobile Bird Guide and Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin Bird ID, have each been downloaded at more than twice the rate as during the same period last year. Cornell’s bird-logging, citizen-science app, eBird, has seen nearly the same increase in activity this year.
The Zerbe family is far from the only one to jump into the world of backyard bird feeding during the pandemic.
Wild Bird Centers of America, a national franchise of birding stores, recently reported “holiday levels” in sales for May through July.
Sales at its franchised stores saw sales increases of as much as 45 percent over the same period last year, while online sales quadrupled.
"A lot of folks are looking for ways to entertain themselves at home," said George Petrides Jr., CEO of WBCA. "Feeding and watching birds allows for a relaxing, holistic and soothing escape, and is the perfect activity for those staying close to home or home-bound for health reasons."
As the pandemic took hold, WBCA stores pivoted to offering no-contact curbside pickup and delivery options for its customers.
Even as some have now re-opened to in-store customers, depending on local ordinances and guidelines, those services have continued to be in demand and will be part of the larger strategy going forward.
Similarly, in May the Associated Press reported that sales of birding merchandise are up 10-15 percent this year, according to Panancea Products Corp., a manufacturer of bird-feeding products.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library, the world’s largest digital collection of animal sounds, also has experienced a pandemic boom.
From March 1 through May 31 birders submitted more than 100,000 audio recordings of bird songs to the archive, which took more than 70 years to gather its first 100,000.
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If you have a story about getting started in backyard birding in 2020 that you would like to share, send a note to Marcus Schneck at mschneck@pennlive.com.
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Backyard bird feeding sales booming in pandemic - pennlive.com
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