America’s #1 Eco Sport: Birdwatching! – The ‘Mini Dinosaur’ Revolution

When I was a kid back in the 1960’s, I thought my family was unconventionally special – more eccentric even than the family cartoon characters drawn by Charles Addams in the neighboring town of Westfield, New Jersey. Whereas the fictional Addams Family characters spent most of their time living in a gloomy mansion next to a swamp and cemetery at Cemetery Lane – my family lived on top of a former golf course – in a retrofitted Cape Cod house overlooking a compost pile, a leviathan trash can with a homemade anemometer attachment and various interplanetary travel equipment and several monster-fingered, kid-eating bushes and trees that stealthily moved into our backyard at night.

It was in those very same bushy-eyed beastly shrubs that my older brother took refuge – tracking the scurrying movements of tiny beaked creatures that flittered in and out – that decades later would be identified by paleontologists as the evolutionary miniaturization of once massive meat-eating dinosaurs. Indeed, it came as no surprise to me to learn that today’s feathered birds were once prehistoric monsters — because as children, my two brothers and I had long accepted the fact that ‘monsters’ were just other members of our household who happened for the most part to enjoy living in our attic, our basement and under our bed, and of course, scaring the bejesus out of us.

But did you know that ‘bird-watching’ is now the fastest growing outdoor family activity in America – with over 75 million viewers and still growing? Even more remarkable are the adventure trends in bird-watching and the birding products and technologies now being offered in today’s marketplace. Here are just a few samples:

– Spa-Heated & Year-round Heated Birdbaths for the Backyard
– Thistle-perched & Squirrel Resistant Bird Feeders
– Weather-proofed, Motion-activated, digitized BirdCams
– Swarovski High-End Birding Binoculars
– Birdwatching DVD’s and Video Field Guides
– Birdsighting CD-ROM’s & Birdsinging Books
– Himalayan and Mexican Bird Counting Trips at Christmas
– Bird Banding Vacations in Colorado
– Exotic Bird Watching Tours in Thailand, Costa Rica and Ecuador

And with over 10,000 species of birds in the world, it’s no wonder that these “mini-dinosaurs” are now the main attraction at Birding Festivals everywhere. But for me, these feathered dinosaurs will always remain the secret domain of my older brother – the red-headed, double-crested, booby-footed nether world of a child’s backyard imagination.