Bilious Blogg writes: I'm just back in the UK after a few days stuck in a hotel in Los Angeles with a heavy cold. All those birds nearby - and I hadn't even the strength to raise a smile...

I had email access though. and found I had an automated notification from the web's largest bird forum saying that there'd been a reply to a post I'd made querying why conservation threads get read by so few members, but year-lists/ID queries/'hello I'm a newbie' threads get devoured by the group's huge number of supposedly keen birders. The explanation, according to one of the correspondents was "what I call grief fatigue". "Grief fatigue"? What the Hell...apparently there's just so much bad news about that people don't want to know about it anymore...

Wonderful.

You have to ask two things: yes, there's plenty of bad news around but what 'grief' have these forum members suffered that makes it too tiring for them to care anymore: a life of extreme poverty and despair perhaps; their village/community being devestated by AIDS or drought; or they and their families being beaten up repeatedly by military-police for trying to stop their forest home from being felled - not very likely they'd still be mailing a bird forum really; and can you imagine what state the world would be in if everyone claimed to feel the same way? We'd be stuffed - absolutely, irretrievably stuffed. There'd be nothing left out there. What would birders do then? Twitch pictures in a book? Maybe start that all important "Birds seen in a Zoo" list.

If the people who claim to care about birds give up what hope can we have that the people who don't care might one day be brought round to being a little more interested in the world around them? ..

What is it with some birders? Can anyone imagine the head of Exxon/Mobil coming down to breakfast one day saying he was suffering from "exploitation fatigue" ("Please, don't make me exploit any environments today - I just can't stand any more exploitation"), or the board members of some huge East Asian conglomeration sitting down over their sake complaining that they had "development fatigue" and just wanted to stop building things for a while? How often do the world's leading industrialist get together and sigh a collective sigh that all this environmental destruction is just "so, so wearying"?

What a load of c**p.

Fatigued? Hell, yes, but only of garbage like "grief fatigue" being trotted out as an excuse for complacency and apathy.

Oh, and don't bother telling me I'm no longer welcome at the Forum - I wouldn't have written this if I was bothered about that...

I don't keep a "comment" forum on this blog simply because I'm sometimes away for days on end and don't want some spammer or complete fool clogging up my site. What I do appreciate is an email occasionally - either to agree or disagree, I really don't mind.

A fellow-birder in Germany, Jochen Roeder, whom I've never met but have corresponded with a great deal, sent me this comment (reproduced with his permission - I ALWAYS ask first) - in response to my post of September 24th: Fatigued? You betcha...

My esteemed colleague Mike (well-known blogger and founder of the excellent blog carnival I and the Bird) posted a passionate blog a couple of days ago (September 28, 2005: The Ecology Of A Travesty) that linked into the thoughts outlined in the blogs above. He pointed out just how multitudinous the threats to the world's eco-systems are and asked what the response of birders and naturalists should be. In an almost rhetorical aside he ended his post wondering whether there is such a thing as a "birding community" anymore...

It's a very interesting question, and here are my thoughts.

Personally, I recoil whenever anyone uses the word "community". The word has lost any sense of its historical roots, when a "community" was a self-contained group dependent on and working for each other. It seems now just to be a loose term used to bracket social, religious, or lifestyle groups together. Here in the UK the media regularly use the word "community" when talking about the country's Moslems or Christians: it has become meaningless, a lazy way to meld individuals into a homogenous - and therefore easily-labelled - group. It ignores the fact that one person in the "community" may have substantially different views on a number of issues to another despite both believing in the same God, being from the same socio-economic background, or both being gay. It's too limiting, too restrictive - media-friendly stereotyping.

The same is true of the "birding community". I don't believe it exists and - what's more - I'm not sure that there has ever been such a thing. Since the dawn of birdwatching there have been categories of "birdwatchers": ornithologists, researchers, taxonomists, hunter-collectors, countryfolk - could anyone believe that they belong to the same community? Does someone who likes feeding birds in their garden but is more interested in the sports team they support really belong to the same "community" as someone who lives to see rarities and organises their calendar around peak migration times? In turn is the twitcher really in the same "community" as someone else who spends their weekends on their local patch watching over birds and their habitats? Are they in the same group as someone working for a large environmental NGO who never gets into the field anymore, but would spend the last moment on earth trying to protect birds. I don't believe so. They all have an interest in birds - but that's about all. Their responses to birds and their commitment to them are too different. You may as well ask them if they like chocolate, and if they do lump them in a new "chocolate community".

So - in my opinion - the "birding community" is dead: does it matter though?

I think it matters a great deal. It matters because the threats to our birdlife are so pressing and so urgent that those of us - like Mike and Jochen (see the blog "Grief fatigue": another birder comments..." above) and many others - who believe that there should be more to birding than just looking at birds can't afford to waste time and resources trying to motivate an entire "community" when that "community" doesn't exist.

Proper communities can be motivated to respond "communally": if a small village is threatened by eg a development or flooding, then there will probably be a community reponse. What affects one villager in such a situation will probably have an impact on all of them, so all of them will be motivated to do something. If I tell a birder though that the Spoon-billed Sandpiper Calidris pygmaea is probably threatened with extinction I can have no idea what the response will be, despite the fact that the garden-bird feeding birder would probably think (if shown a photo) that's it's a beautiful bird, despite the fact that the twitcher would drive hundreds of miles to see one if it turned up in their particular listing area, despite the fact that the local patch warden would be up in arms if it were going extinct on their patch - even the manager of the NGO might do nothing if it didn't impact directly on their organisation or was not regionally-relevant.

I think that this leads to a number of important questions: eg does anyone actually care if the "community" is dead, and if so is there anything we can replace the "community" with?

My instinct is that some of us - many us perhaps - care a great deal. If that is the case we would like a viable alternative, and I do believe that there is something we can replace the concept of "a community" with - and that's via the internet: it's through websites, blogs, and - in particular - through blog carnivals.

One of the reasons I help promote "I and the Bird" is because I think it - or something like it (I'm hesitant to second-guess Mike) - will become an influential "publication". Could a birding blog carnival become the equivalent of an online magazine - with a section devoted to conservation matters, upcoming events, actions or campaigns? If it could, it could reach literally hundreds of thousands of people. Without the internet it would be inconcievable - with it, perhaps we can bring together our combined skills and ideas and become a more useful lobby group/information portal?

It's not a radical idea to suggest that there is an "internet community" already of course but that term is as vague and meaningless as "birding community" (and for the same reasons). I think we need to take things much further and become more organised. In an old-style community all members would have had a role, and would (however indirectly) work to a common goal. Some members would have been artisans, some suppliers, some would disseminate information and some would lead. I'm not suggesting that we need to appoint people to positions - it wouldn't be possible - but perhaps some of us (those who are interested) may be willing to take on roles that would allow our passions and our commitments to be more focussed, and ultimately more effective?

Is such a concept practical (in a real community members would expect to be paid for their work - in ours I imagine we'd be unfunded and unrewarded, at least at first!)? Can the idea be forced along or should it be allowed to develop organically? Perhaps that's the way that carnivals such as "I and the Bird" would develop anyway, but my whole point is that the world's ecosystems simply don't have the time to wait...

I'd be very interested to hear what other birders/bloggers think. Please email me...

Steve, Italy - "I agree completely with those stating that "grief fatigue" should not be in ultimate analysis a deterrant to continuing individual striving to affect where one can, and in whatever measure one might, the continued existance of habitats and the life forms inhabiting them, be they birds or whatever. It is not that I discount the existence of a phenomenon that might be termed "grief fatigue" [but] since I view most of western mans' interaction with nature as denatured I personally will continue to do what little that I can just out of pure orneriness and an abiding complete disaccord with the philosophical tenet separating sacred and profane.
[However] I wanted to break a lance on behalf of certain members, useful members of the so-called "birding community", in an indirect response to "Bilious Blogg" regarding the thinly veiled largest bird forum on the web. While I do agree that for many aspects the site is populated by an inordinate number of members absorbed in twitching information or in the umpteenth thread on the finer aspects of Pipit identification, there are many members that outside of the ambit of that particular site are personally involved in conservation in a meaningful way. Perhaps they do not constantly talk about it, but many do this without advertising about themselves or their endeavors."

"Bilious Blogg" - You're absolutely right of course, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Looking at [what I wrote] again it certainly could be interpreted that way...and I appreciate the fact that you didn't just mail me telling me I'm an arrogant SOB who should know better. There are some extremely hard-working and very concerned members of bird forums everywhere, and that needs to be recognised and acknowledged.
I do still think that we (particularly "we" in the west) have hardly any concept of what "grief" is anymore and I do get annoyed by birders who say that they're just too "grief fatigued" to keep on trying. It's a shame that the vast membership of forums can't be motivated to work together - but the point was not particularly well-made...