A History of Birdwatching in 100 Objects

While field observations often disappear into a drawer forever when kept in diary or notebook form, the advent of online weblogs or ‘blogs’ has enabled birders to share their sightings, opinions and observations with other like minds all over the globe.

Blogging has such a ubiquitous presence online today that it is easy to forget just how recently this method of keeping a journal and maintaining a website appeared in both birding and wider circles.

Essentially, a blog – derived from ‘weblog’ – differs from a website in that it features discrete posts published in order of date and time. It can be open to public scrutiny, sometimes with visitor comments on posts, or private, and viewable only by subscription or invitation. Generally, a single person keeps the blog, but multi-person blogs were introduced in 2009, and in birding circles this has been particularly successful in the case of 10000 birds.com.

What we now know as a blog originated in Usenet or Bulletin Board forums, and more specifically from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab page called Open Diary, maintained by Claudio Pinhanez for a couple of years from November 1994. A different Open Diary was probably the first social networking software, launching in 1998, but by the end of that year there were still only 23 known weblogs on the internet. A year later there were tens of thousands, the difference being the launch of Pyra Lab’s www.blogger.com. The huge boost in popularity of what had hitherto been a quite parochial and personal form saw Blogger acquired by Google within four years.

With explosive growth triggered by ‘pushbutton publishing’, as Blogger described it, birders quickly adopted the technology. Today there are countless thousands of professional and amateur birding blogs covering every conceivable aspect of the hobby, from general birding and tour diaries to more specialist topics such as ringing studies or taxonomy. A significant number also routinely feature other quirky subjects, from pies to indie music, in an effort to make them stand out from the growing crowd. A blog can be specific to a single trip or patch, or reflect the birding life and philosophy of its writer; it can belong to a birding company or to a known birding ‘guru’, and accordingly attract a legion of followers.

A rapid development in 2005 was the brief and immediate stream of consciousness form of so-called tumblelogs, which soon developed into the now-essential (for many) microblog. Though Twitter has created a worldwide phenomenon through the facility to say something quickly – and globally – within 140 characters, other sites like Tumblr.comand the status updates of Facebook and other social networking sites have also revolutionised the way people interact with each other, including birders quick to capitalise on these new media.

These free-to-join networks are now widely used to disseminate innermost thoughts, trivia and observations, and are also ideal for spreading the news of bird sightings and birding products, both between individuals and between companies and their customers. All such services can trace their history back to that early MIT ‘diary’ which unwittingly shaped the future of the online world.