DAVID WARDEN WAS ABOUT FOUR YEARS OLD WHEN HE WAS LIFTED UP TO see the eggs in a blackbird nest in a garden hedge in Hall Green, a southern suburb of the midland city of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. He was ten when he found a nest all by himself in the same garden hedge. This time it was a dunnock nest. The dunnock—whose name is from the Celtic word dunn kos, which means “little brown one”—is a drab bird with a quirky sex life: females mate with many males, over a hundred times per day, which leads each male to first peck at the female cloaca in the hopes of stimulating ejection of sperm from other males, followed by spending one-tenth of a second copulating. For a budding naturalist, it was a bonus that the nest also contained an egg of the cuckoo, a parasitic bird that lays her eggs in the nests of other species. At the time, during the Second World War, Warden had an uncertain future. He scarcely imagined that he’d grow up to be a veterinary surgeon with a small country practice. He absolutely did not imagine that his hobby would include finding over thirteen thousand nests during the next seventy years or that he would still be at it in his eighties. Nor did he know at that time that his sundry observations would be used by researchers half a century later in pivotal publications demonstrating that some impacts of global warming had already arrived. Back then he was simply a kid in a wool newsboy cap and sweater. Warden was born in 1933, the same year that the British Trust for Ornithology was established; five years after finding his first cuckoo-infested nest, Warden began reporting all of his observations of nesting birds to the Hatching and Fledgling Inquiry (which eventually became the Nest Record Scheme) of the Trust. That was 1948, and Warden was unwittingly contributing to our understanding of global warming the year Al Gore—who eventually became a leading climate change activist—was born.
Most commonly, the observations from one individual’s hobby does not lead to new discoveries, but new insights emerge from the aggregate of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people like Warden. The power of the crowd is a hallmark of citizen science. For example, long-term birdwatchers report that the thrill of finding a nest never fades, “even if it is one’s five hundredth blue tit,” explains Roger Peart, who has reported bird nests to the British Trust for Ornithology since 1972.7
Today the Nest Record Scheme boasts over 1.6 million nest records. Birdwatchers recorded observations of each nest on a nest record card, about the size of an index card. Stockpiled in filing cabinets at the British Trust for Ornithology, many of the cards have been scanned into digital images. In addition, the information on a large subset of over 450,000 cards have been manually entered into a database; one volunteer has entered over 40,000 historic cards alone. The nest records that have been digitized to date have contributed to more than 250 research papers. Many of these papers are only of interest to ornithologists and birders and describe the nitty-gritty natural history of particular species. Two of the most notable papers, however, are about how climate change is affecting birds. These were authored by H. Q. P. Crick and colleagues.
I connect with Humphrey Crick on Twitter; to my gleeful surprise, he has already been following me. Despite his English modesty, I am able to get him to admit that his papers in the highest-ranked journal Nature, in 1997 and again in 1999, were “quite groundbreaking at the time.” I’m not sure if he means groundbreaking in citizen science, ornithology, or climate change, but they were in fact important for all of those. Crick explains that his employer, the British Trust for Ornithology, had started “upping its scientific game” under the leadership of the previous director, the late Raymond O’Connor.
Scholarly papers are the currency in science. Businesses are valued by revenue acquired, but a research project is assessed by how many scientific papers it produces and where these are published. Scientific journals are not all equal. Some are ranked lower, as suitable for small findings, like the basic natural history of where birds nest. Others are ranked higher, for bigger work like testing hypotheses with field observations or experiments. For example, when Crick and David Gibbons used volunteer data to study seasonal changes in the number of eggs laid per nest, Crick explained that “it was quite a coup to get this into Journal of Animal Ecology” (an upper-middle ranked journal). A few journals are in the top tier, like Nature and Science, where the criteria for publication is not only that the study design is sound and the conclusions are supported by the data but that the findings are also of relevance to a broad swath of people. When O’Connor said it was time to deliver the goods, it meant Crick needed to get papers based on volunteer data published in the most prestigious journals possible.
As soon as Crick started looking at long-term patterns in the data of the Nest Record Scheme, “one of the trends that leapt off the page was a large number of species showing trends towards earlier laying.” His immediate thought was that earlier laying could be linked to global warming and could be worth a paper. Yet, he says, “A couple of years passed.” This is his way, again with English modesty, of saying that he initially failed to realize the importance of preparing such a paper.
At the time it had been established that global warming was caused by human activity, but its consequences to people were still uncertain—let alone its impact on birds. Conservation was place-based. An entire academic field of conservation biology was burgeoning, but the focus was on local issues such as deciding whether a given land concession was better as one large reserve or as a network of small pieces. Upon this small-scale scene arrived a large-scale problem that could not be solved by merely preventing paradise from being paved into a parking lot. It took a while for the significance of global warming research to sink in—even for Crick, who was sitting on valuable climate change data.
Plus, no one really cared about egg laying dates back then. How could early or late laying matter more than clutch size (number of eggs), the number of nestlings, and the overall success of the nest? So even when Crick saw the obvious trends, he tucked the data in the back of his mind, figuring that no one would consider it important.
Crick would have eventually published his paper, but probably not as quickly—and definitely not in the most prestigious journal—had it not been for Chris Mead. Mead worked in the bird ringing program at the British Trust for Ornithology and, in his lifetime, ringed over 400,000 birds of 350 species from eighteen countries. In the worldwide process of ringing (or banding, as it is known in the United States), nonprofessionals dedicate countless hours to helping people like Mead catch birds and place uniquely numbered metal bracelets around their tarsus foot bones (the area above their claws). Birds are banded in the hopes of recapturing them later in life. Those banded as chicks and recaptured as adults provide estimates of survivorship. Those banded during migration and recaptured en route, or on the return route the following year, help researchers decipher migration pathways and the timing of their use. There is a handbook, a sort of avian Cartier catalog, detailing the appropriate size of bracelet for each species to prevent chafing. Professionals and volunteers use specially designed pliers to carefully crimp each bracelet for the perfect fit. Similar to hunting, individuals are required to obtain training and state and federal permits in order to capture and band birds. People who knew Mead make him sound like Hagrid with ringing pliers—he was “a gentle bearded giant,” Crick remembers.8
In April 1997 Mead showed Crick a new paper in Nature in which Boston University’s Ranga Myneni and his colleagues used satellite data to show that in the northern part of the globe there has been an increase in photosynthesis over recent decades, creating a longer plant growing season, consistent with warmer temperatures. Crick remembers Mead providing him needed encouragement to aim for a brief paper in Nature as a follow-up. Mead emphasized what Crick already knew but needed to hear: the British Trust for Ornithology had a stockpile of data for a wide range of species showing unequivocal trends that strongly suggested that this part of the animal world was already being influenced by global warming.
Mead was entirely correct on all counts. Nature accepted the paper and published it in August 1997. Crick’s findings were something the world needed to hear. The British government, at negotiations to adopt the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, referred to the study as evidence that real effects on wildlife were already occurring.
Crick wrote a second paper more tightly linking egg laying dates to climate change. This paper, which he completed with Tim Sparks during six weeks of sabbatical from the British Trust for Ornithology, was also accepted in Nature and published in June 1999. He notes, “That was a better paper, as it suggested quite a strong link to climate change that was unlikely to be due to other covarying factors.”
Thanks to hundreds of volunteers like Warden who have monitored nests and shared their observations in a systematic way for decades, Crick presented twenty-five-year patterns in twenty very different species that were each tending to lay their eggs earlier and earlier. He also showed over fifty-seven years of observations that the laying date of thirty-one species corresponded to weather—in some cases, temperature, and in other cases, rainfall. For the 1999 paper he analyzed almost a million nest records.
Crick says it didn’t seem to matter to anyone that his evidence came from birdwatchers rather than traditional scientists. Many other papers had been criticized for sparse data and so, Crick suspects, “the reviewers were generally bowled over by the sheer amount of data we could present.” The global scientific community follows the Royal Society motto Nullius in verba to the extreme. Thus, it’s never surprising when reviewers raise concerns about the quality of data collected by citizen scientists. As Crick learned, one accepted solution to data quality concerns is in the high volume of observations that can drown out any influence of occasional errors. And so, citizen science puts an addendum on the Royal motto: Take no individual’s word for it, but if the masses agree, take their cumulative word. With thousands of observations, researchers even have the freedom to toss the questionable or extreme outliers from analyses and look for patterns and trends in the core. If they detect a signal despite the noise, then the pattern found in the data is trustworthy.
The Americans were not far behind Crick; Peter O. Dunn and David W. Winkler published a paper in 1999 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society; using over three thousand nest records submitted by North American birdwatchers, they demonstrated that tree swallows have been incrementally breeding earlier and earlier, resulting in a difference of nine days earlier in 1991 than in 1959, due primarily to increasing surface air temperatures over the years.9
If birds don’t begin mating at the right time, they can experience what scientists refer to as a trophic mismatch. This means the best food is abundant before the birds need it, as when dessert comes out of the oven before the appetizers are ready to be served. Birds rely heavily on insects as a food source for their offspring, and insects are highly responsive to temperature, many skyrocketing in number when the preferred temperatures are reached. Ornithologists think that birds reproduce most successfully if they time their chick rearing to coincide with a peak in insect abundance. But three developmental stages come before the hatching of chicks: nest building, egg laying, and incubation; thus, birds have to anticipate and plan for the fourth stage in the reproductive effort. They have adaptations, appropriately named biological clocks and calendars, that enable them to anticipate the timing of seasonal changes, assuming conditions are similar year after year. If, however, the insect abundance peaks earlier in spring than the birds are historically accustomed to, thus catching them unprepared, the birds can suffer the consequences. A citizen science study of over one hundred migratory birds that breed in northern Europe has shown that even though birds arrive on their breeding grounds earlier than they did even a decade ago, they don’t arrive early enough. Insects, which respond to local temperatures, emerge too soon, and peak before eggs hatch. Birds are better off if their schedule is just right: not too early and not too late. This timing of mating is where natural selection and Goldilocks see eye to eye.
Not surprisingly, the impact of spring occurring earlier is not unique to birds and insects, and is most pronounced in species more sensitive to shifts in temperature. The most well-established responses to global climate change are shifts in the timing of life cycle events: flowers bloom earlier; caterpillars transform into butterflies sooner; frogs call for mates earlier than expected; and people begin sneezing from hay fever at unprecedented times of year. Throughout history, people have made note of various tokens of spring. Like day tally scratches on a prison cell wall, people avoid losing heart by taking note of any sign of winter’s retreat. Changes in the signs of spring correspond to two hallmarks of global warming: milder winters and higher spring temperatures.
Dunn and Winkler used nest records of tree swallows from many citizen science projects throughout Canada and the United States, including one of the largest nest monitoring programs in North America, NestWatch. Originally called the Cornell Nest Record Cards, NestWatch was started in the mid-1960s in response to catastrophic declines in some bird species due to the widespread use of the pesticide DDT.10 Via NestWatch, tree swallows are the second most commonly reported birds after bluebirds. There are three species of bluebirds across the country: the Eastern, the Mountain, and the Western (the range of each of these species correspond roughly to these time zones). It was by studying data on bluebirds in NestWatch when I was employed at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that I first learned the details of the hobby of nest monitoring.
Finding the nest of a wild bird is not easy, and it is only the first step in nest monitoring. Collecting valuable data requires dedication to visit the nest again and again to determine the pace of its progress and its ultimate fate. Nest monitors are like doctors making their rounds: with each visit they note the health of the nest, anything unusual, and details about the progress of the reproductive attempt—nest construction complete, eggs present, chicks hatched, and so on. Nest record cards in the United States were modeled after the conventions in the United Kingdom, as used by David Warden. A nest record card contains a series of rows, each with a date and details of what was observed at the nest on that date.
While nest monitors take meticulous notes about the same nest over and over again, birdwatchers keep checklists of species seen in a given location at a given date and time. The convention among birdwatchers, which has proven useful for citizen science, is for bird species on checklists to be arranged in taxonomic order. This is a classification system that organizes birds to roughly reflect evolutionary relationships. Such relationships are complex, like family trees, but they are made linear on checklists for organizational purposes. When in taxonomic order, all the ducks are together, all the hawks are together, all the hummingbirds are together, and so forth. A birder might keep a variety of checklists: a cumulative lifetime checklist (commonly called a life list), a home checklist, an office checklist, a travel checklist, a state checklist, a from-my-bathroom-window checklist,11 and the like. Of course, science is also about listing one’s observations. Hence, the perfect match.
Whether nest monitor, bander, backyard birdwatcher, or expert birder, all of these bird hobbyists have contributed to our understanding of birds and climate change, and many other areas of inquiry too. But bird enthusiasts don’t always pick and choose which type of bird hobby to have—many do it all, like Kaycee Lichliter.
In 2007, shortly after I began cutting my teeth analyzing NestWatch data for research on bluebird reproduction, Lichliter, a NestWatcher in Virginia who voluntarily managed a trail of nest boxes at the Blandy Farm Experimental Station near Winchester, invited me to give a public talk. Since 2005 she and Greg Baruffi had been participating in a study that I had coordinated about bluebird incubation rhythms.12 They were both all-around bird enthusiasts, spending their free time monitoring nests, banding birds, and making checklists for a host of different citizen science projects.
Lichliter was drawn into bird hobbies in 2003, under the guidance of several men who taught her to monitor nests and band nestlings. Her most important mentor was Sam Patton, who had been a key part of the bluebird trail at Blandy Farm Experimental Station since at least 1997. Patton took Lichliter under his proverbial wing, immediately spotting her potential to be his successor. On her first day out, a bright and sunny one, she rode around the farm in Patton’s car. They would stop on the two-track dirt road, hop out, and hike up to each box. Patton, elderly and shrunken, would remove a latch, open the side wall of the box, and peek in. Lichliter would stand directly behind him and, towering at exactly six feet, peek over his head. No two nests are the same: some have happy outcomes, and some are plagued with disease, parasites, and untimely death. Nest monitors experience both the joys and the harsh realities of nature, one nest at a time. The Blandy trail was handed over to Lichliter the following year, and Patton helped out until he died.
To sustain and grow the trail, Lichliter elicited help. She coordinates a group of about forty-five volunteers each year made up of nurses, retired doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, and moms and dads. People who don’t want to just learn about problems, she told me; they want to get out there and try to do something about them. Getting involved in the day-to-day business of birds and their families can be emotionally draining. Nature is harsh, even in our backyards, and nothing is easy once that nest is created: predation, starvation, and hypothermia are not uncommon.
When Lichliter inherited the trail the boxes were on wooden posts without predator guards. Some were occupied by mice, and some had fallen to the ground. After meeting Greg Baruffi during an annual Christmas Bird Count, she recruited him to help refurbish the whole trail with over 130 nest boxes.
The Christmas Bird Count is one of the birding community’s oldest citizen science traditions. Its precursor in the 1800s was an annual competitive hunt of birds and small game animals for Christmas feasts. In 1900 the tradition morphed into an event to comprehensively make checklists of living wild birds. Now birdwatchers bundle up against the cold and huddle in groups to make a checklist of birds seen or heard within sectors of their assigned fifteen-mile circle over the course of Christmas Day. There are over two thousand of these preestablished circles for the Christmas Bird Count across the United States.
While nesting data has revealed earlier breeding due to climate change, the winter counts have revealed that species are shifting their winter ranges north. In one study of 254 species recorded regularly in the Christmas Bird Count at various locations around the United States, researchers estimated that these birds have gradually been shifting their winter habitats to the north, by about one kilometer per year on average between 1975 and 2004. Such shifting is partly driven by warmer winters associated with global climate change.
Baruffi was a citizen scientist Renaissance man in his spare time, with expertise in collecting checklists on birds, taking samples for water quality, and helping monitor wildflowers. Lichliter got Baruffi into nest monitoring, and then into bird banding; together they completed a course offered in nearby Warrenton, Virginia, by the California-based Point Reyes Bird Observatory to get their banding licenses. At the nearby Burwell–van Lennep Foundation, they set up a station for the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) program, a continent-wide effort of mostly volunteer banders who run what is called constant-effort mist nesting stations typically aimed at capturing and banding songbirds.13 For banding larger birds, Lichliter and Baruffi went to a popular birding spot, Cape May, New Jersey; he helped her get a red-tailed hawk out of a net, and she help him get the hawk’s talons out of his hands. Lichliter and Baruffi checked hundreds of bluebird nests and banded hundreds of nestlings. The last thing they did together was their fourth Christmas Bird Count in 2007. Three days later, in the darkest hours of the night, Baruffi’s car went into a ditch and he was killed; he was president of the local Audubon chapter at the time.
Lichliter continues as steward of the bluebirds. For people like Lichliter, Baruffi, and Warden, nest watching means keeping an eye on the health of the planet. They are just three of tens of thousands of individuals whose observations in aggregate give us insight into the state of wild birds, and three of millions whose observations give us insight into the state of natural phenomena. Scientists expect some species to be more sensitive to climate change than others, but so far there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the wide range of species affected by it around the world: tree swallow, bluebird, winter wren, dunnock, blackcap, willow warbler, long-tailed tit, greenfinch, and more. These species have a hodgepodge of traits: residents and migrants, insectivores and granivores, single-and multibrooded, great and small. If the planet were a coal mine, then it appears that almost all bird species are canaries.
Avian citizen science boasts a big résumé, with studies of reproductive timing, migration, abundance, and population trends in response to climate change. The bottom line for many birders, however, is the use of citizen science data to document bird distributions and movements in ways that help their conservation. Even though conservation concerns drove the creation of some iconic projects, like the Christmas Bird Count and NestWatch, the conservation kingpin of bird citizen science was born through the Internet; eBird,14 a checklist project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, began in 2002 and has grown into a global network of birdwatchers sharing checklists with a large interdisciplinary team of researchers, including ecologists, statisticians, mathematicians, computer scientists, climate scientists. The eBird team handles big data, and has published over 120 scientific publications so far.
The team processes data quickly so that it can inform management decisions in a timely way. For example, purchasing land for conservation, a founding premise of the Nature Conservancy, can be an effective strategy for managing wildlife populations. Land purchases of breeding or wintering grounds where birds spend months of their lives can be a cost-effective strategy. But what is the best way to help birds along their migration routes where they use many stopover sites, each for a very short period of time?
The Pacific Flyway is a migration route for shorebirds traveling from the Artic to the southern reaches of South America, and it cuts through central California. The fertility of California’s Central Valley stems from the network of rivers, creeks, and sloughs that for millennia spread nutrients like repeated coats of paint with every flood of the surrounding land. More than 95 percent of the original wetlands, a natural stopover site for migrating water birds, have been lost, mostly converted to fields of almonds, apricots, asparagus, and avocados, and on through the alphabet to zucchini. Despite the extreme losses, the area continues to host the highest density of migrating waterfowl in the world—with peaks of seven million ducks. Still standing after one punch of wetland loss, the ecosystem could be knocked down with a second punch.
The second punch has arrived in the form of years of extreme drought in the region, which has left millions of migrating shorebirds and waterfowl with even fewer stopover sites. The Central Valley supports 30 percent of shorebirds and 60 percent of waterfowl that use the Pacific Flyway. In this situation, the Nature Conservancy decided that it could help birds on migration simply by renting rather than purchasing land with the right habitat; it created a market-based program called Bird Returns, which has enrolled over forty farmers along the California portion of the Pacific Flyway. Through reverse auction, every farmer submits a bid, and the Nature Conservancy choses whom to pay to temporarily flood their fields with two to four inches of water during spring and fall migration. More than ten thousand acres are flooded on four-, six-, or eight-week contracts, both leading into and following migration. The key to the project’s success is identifying the right acres to flood within the enormous Central Valley at exactly the right time.
The Nature Conservancy uses eBird data to decide which “pop-up” wetlands to fund during northward and again during southward migration. Citizen science eBird volunteers in California have submitted over 230,000 checklists of the area. With the eBird research team using high-performance computing, they forecast where birds are likely to be present and overlay NASA images of surface water. They spot mismatches and advise the selection of farmers in locations to literally fill the gaps with water. During the initial test, birds used the pop-up wetlands in densities at least twenty times higher than nonflooded neighboring fields. Birders celebrated sightings such as twenty thousand dunlins at a time. All fifty-seven species of shorebirds that migrate through the Central Valley used the pop-up wetlands, for a total of 220,000 birds recorded in pop-up wetlands during migration.
The eBird program’s citizen science adjusts quickly to conservation emergencies too. In April 2011, and for the following five months, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster became the largest oil spill in history, releasing more than 170 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The diverse ecosystems of the gulf waters, the adjacent coast, and the Mississippi River Delta were affected, and the long-term impact is still coming to light. In the immediate wake of the disaster, as people on shore knew the oil slick was approaching barrier islands, estuaries, salt marshes, and other coastal wetlands, the eBird team rapidly modified their system for data collection and display in the hopes of aggregating information to help save birds. The team decided to focus checklists on ten species of known conservation concern, including the roseate spoonbill, the American oystercatcher, and the brown pelican, because these species had only recently been removed from the endangered species list.
At the time, there was a media blackout and people desperately wanted more information. For example, a group formed to float balloons holding cameras over the coast in order to get high-resolution aerial photographs to track the progress of the oil slicks. Initially called Grassroots Mapping, the group later merged with the Public Lab, a ragtag global community in which people share do-it-yourself techniques for monitoring environmental conditions.
In this data void, the creation of the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Tracker as a module within eBird was a valuable source of timely information. The tracker was a mash-up of several data sets in a real-time map of five Gulf Coast states, continually updating the display of all submitted records on the locations of the ten bird species of conservation concern, the current extent of the oil slick, and the seventy-two-hour forecast of the oil slick. The data visualization tool relied on real-time data from eBird participants, Google Maps, oil slick data, and a forecast provided by the Satellite and Information Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The eBird program also modified its web data-entry system to allow observers to report specifically on oiled and sick birds. With a simple question, “Would you like to provide comments or more details about a species (e.g., if a bird is oiled, age/sex, etc.),” it quickly received about nine hundred observations of oiled birds.
The oiled bird reports and the combined maps were useful to steer rescue efforts. Beach cleanup and bird rescue crews needed to make triage decisions to focus their efforts on the species most in need of help and most likely to benefit from rescue. As Brian Sullivan, one of the eBird project managers, explains, “If we get a report of fifty Brown Pelicans with light oiling on one bird, that’s not so bad. But if we get a report of ten Brown Pelicans, and every single one is coated with oil, that’s an area getting badly hit, and it should be a priority for cleanup and bird conservation work.”
The wealth of checklists already collected by the eBird program provided baseline data about bird communities before the spill. In the year following the disaster, more than four thousand birdwatchers along the gulf submitted over 110,000 checklists. Tallies of birds found dead from oil exposure underestimate the true number affected because many bodies are not found. Researchers are using eBird sightings to estimate the likelihood of detecting a bird killed by the oil, and based on those detection estimates they will be able to more reliably estimate the number of birds that died but were never found. A lesson from eBird is the high value of baseline monitoring from leisure birdwatchers, which is too often recognized as priceless only when something unanticipated and tragic happens.
Globally there are over 270,000 eBird participants who collectively have had their eyes behind binoculars for over twenty million hours to provide over 280 million bird observations. It’s worth noting that not all participation is the same. About half of the time, people submit checklists that give a complete account not just of the birds present in an area but also those absent from the area.15 Most of the bird enthusiasts who use eBird simply enjoy its free and plentiful information, often using it to plan their birding trips. Some organizations and federal agencies have mandates to share data they collect, but do so as downloads of cumbersome raw data tables. The eBird program provides data access through state-of-the-art visualizations so that people can make sense of the data. Each year millions visit the eBird website and view dynamic maps of recent observations and other intuitive graphics. This means that a small portion of eBird users, perhaps as few as 1 percent of them, are responsible for submitting the vast majority of the bird sightings. But more people using the data than contributing data doesn’t hamper the program.
The inequity in effort among eBird users is common in citizen science, as it is with other types of crowdsourcing and online engagement in general. For example, most people on the planet with Internet access use Wikipedia, but according to Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, only 9 percent of Wikipedia users edit existing content and just 1 percent create new content. This pattern is known as the 90–9–1 principle. Wales asserts that a core group of contributors do virtually all the work, with the help of occasional contributors who do minor edits. According to this view, most of us take a free ride.
Aaron Swartz, who achieved fame in his teen years for helping develop the web feed format called RSS, has a different take. While Wales created his estimates by counting edits to Wikipedia, Swartz counted the total number of characters added to Wikipedia by each person, which led him to the opposite conclusion. By Swartz’s summation, tens of thousands of contributors pitched in a little content to Wikipedia and a core of five hundred to a thousand regulars carried out edits such as correcting spelling and formatting. Swartz’s view is that “the formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around.” According to this view, each casual contributor tosses in a bit here and there, and cumulatively these people create the bulk of Wikipedia. Certainly it makes sense that an encyclopedia could be filled quickly by many users rather than a small group of know-it-alls. With hard-core birders, however, maybe the core can see it all.
In eBird’s early years, the program used the tagline “Birding for a Purpose.” This captured some altruistic birders, but not a sufficient number. In 2006 the eBird project managers changed their strategy and eventually adopted the slogan “Birding in the 21st Century.” The program showed birders what’s possible with their collective observations if they record the number of individuals of each species seen rather than simply a list of species seen. Thus hard-core birders wanted to embrace the maturation of their hobby as it morphed into a technique that impacts science and conservation.
Whether banding, monitoring, or making checklists, all birders like to notice things. Consider a tree that holds a huge and rambunctious flock of cedar waxwings who have unwittingly become rip-roaring drunk. When fruit sits on bushes all winter, it can ferment, turning each holly berry into a bright red shot of liquor. Consequently, cedar waxwings often become inebriated in the spring. Four out of five people who pass a tree filled with waxwings will only notice the tree; one in five, who may or may not call themselves birdwatchers, will notice a very dignified-looking flock of birds behaving in a relatively undignified way. The ones who notice, who claim extra moments to enjoy and who take note of their surroundings and/or add the birds to their checklists, are the ones rewarded with the peculiar dramas of nature. And those who take the added time to share their observations reward all of us with a world of birds.
If all citizen science required a high level of expertise and the ability to identify drunken waxwings, then the skew in participation would be even greater. But much of citizen science simply requires time. For many of us time seems a rarity, but for others time is the only thing on our side. W. C. Minor was a deranged murderer who contributed more words than any other to the crowdsourcing effort that created the Oxford English Dictionary. He had time to make these contributions during his confinement in a London insane asylum from the late 1800s until the early 1900s. His contributions ended when his dementia worsened and he cut off his own penis (the word for it is autopeotomy) with a knife he had access to because of his dictionary contributions. As we’ll see in the next chapter, there are all sorts of people with time to be involved in citizen science, even inmates, each enjoying the sense that they contribute to a larger, collaborative effort.