A History of Birdwatching in 100 Objects

“Give me the child, and I will mould the man,” a Jesuit missionary is alleged to have said. Birding charities and organisations have taken a more innocent version of this maxim to mind, continually creating initiatives and clubs to encourage young birders, including perhaps the most successful: the RSPB’s Young Ornithologists’ Club.

How to get young people interested in natural history, and specifically birding, is a perennial question, and the RSPB had an answer – actually, several answers – in its youth division. Originally this took the form of the Junior Bird Recorders’ Club, launched in 1943, but with much greater appeal and more influential to the current generation of middle-aged birders was the Young Ornithologists’ Club (YOC), which replaced it in 1965 and flourished until 2000.

Local YOC groups were particularly successful in schools and on dedicated field courses, where many budding birders went on their first trips to visit nature reserves and have their first sightings of species that hitherto had only been known from the few bird books in the school or local library. At its peak in 1980 YOC membership topped 100,000, its budding young members reading their Bird Life magazines enthusiastically and wearing their hovering Kestrel badges with pride.

Lifelong friendships were forged, careers and hobbies inspired, and tips and experiences exchanged, and many schoolchildren who did not become or remain birders retained enough interest in wildlife to maintain memberships of wildlife and conservation charities, feed their garden birds and perhaps even consider green policies of importance in political parties’ manifestos.

At the turn of the century, the YOC was succeeded by the Wildlife Explorers – a broad-brush evolution of the earlier clubs aimed at children aged eight to 12, and currently with more than 170,00 members. Additionally, RSPB Phoenix was launched for teenagers in 1995, and now boasts more than 38,000 members. Both encourage field trips and volunteering, and both have house magazines in Wild Times and Bird Life respectively.

Conservationists have become ever more conscious of the disconnection of young people from the natural world, perhaps as most now have children and have noticed the differences in lifestyle from their own at the same age. This concern came to a head with the publication of the National Trust’s Natural Childhood report (2012), written by TV producer and naturalist Stephen Moss. Many experts and organisations were consulted on their thoughts about the public in general and children in particular being out of touch with nature, though there was little agreement about what could be done.

With membership of the RSPB’s youth organisations healthy, the many other children who are not experiencing wild animals and natural habitats can perhaps be encouraged by school trips and the greening of urban areas. The future is up for grabs, and Natural Childhood may help us enter it not entirely blindly.