Coupled with this new regime of hermetic bodies are the technologies of surveillance that we have willingly adopted into our daily lives. We all know that most of our online interactions are logged by the likes of Google, Apple, and the major telcos, and we know that these same companies continue to track our movements using GPS data from our mobile phones, even if they claim otherwise. Police forces and governments are now talking about using this GPS data to enforce quarantine and self-isolation orders. Sure, this can be justified as a means to "flattening the curve," but we really do need to be careful about what we wish for. It’s a slippery slope. As we learned in our post-911 world, temporarily giving up rights and freedoms often results in permanent restrictions written into law or simply accepted as okay in the name of security against terrorism, and now viruses. It remains to be seen which of the new restrictions on body movements will disappear, attenuate, or remain.
So what does this have to do with birding? A lot! Many of the parks and woodlands where birders go to view and record bird activity have been closed to the public. For birders, this couldn’t have happened at a worse time. It’s spring migration and billions of birds are on the move from their wintering grounds in the south to their breeding grounds in the north. Where I live, in Hamilton, Ontario, we are along one of North America's major bird migration flyways. Spring migration brings many species through the area that we only see during migration. It’s a beautiful, life-affirming spectacle, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s an opportunity to assess bird populations and their movements, including the dates of their migration and other data, all of which can tell us something about the impacts of environmental damage and climate change.
Most birders are enamoured by the beauty of birds and their behaviours, but many birders are also participants in what is probably the world’s largest example of organized citizen science. I’m talking about eBird, an application developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Many birders use eBird to record the birds they see, including when and where they see them. eBird collects bird data from millions of birders around the world and makes it freely available to anyone with an internet connection. It is a remarkably useful tool for gathering big data on bird populations and movements, and it serves as a useful tool for birders interested in locating and observing specific species.
One of the features of eBird is that it tracks when and where birds are reported, and this data is associated with the user’s name. Users have the option of being anonymous, but from my experience, most use their real names. Records are associated either with predefined hotspots or with the user's GPS coordinates. When you search eBird for hotspots or species, you are presented with a map of pins geographically representing records, which you can open up for the full record over decades of that predefined hotspot or user-defined place. eBird also collects the route someone has walked and how long it took them to walk it, although this is only viewable by the record-maker and, I assume, the Cornell Lab. This sounds a little like what Apple and others have done with mobile phone data, although eBird does it with the user’s knowledge and permission.
Ironically, eBird tracks the spatial and temporal movements of birders as much as it tracks this information about birds. Without much effort, anyone can see the when and the where of a birder’s birding records. Someday I’ll dig into the many meanings that we can find in this collection of an individual’s records, but for now I want to highlight what this could mean in a time of pandemic body governance.
Within less than a minute, I was able to see records of birders in parks and woodlands that have been closed to the public, although far fewer records than one would find under normal circumstances. Is it hubris to post these records, a belief that the individual's desires or citizen science outweighs the social benefits of restrictions during pandemic governance? I don’t have an answer for why, but I do find myself sensing a bright red flag for how this data could be used. If restrictions upon our movements increase (as they have been) and if penalties for breaking these restrictions are increasingly enforced (as we are beginning to see), then what is stopping authority from viewing these records as evidence of illegal activity? I suppose it depends upon how strongly the state will enforce its new rules, but it remains that posting records from areas with restricted access is a performance of disregard. For some, this is socially irresponsible; for others, this is commitment to citizen science.
One thing is clear. The usual avenues for reporting bird sightings are very quiet these days. Email listservs, messaging apps, and eBird itself are all nearly silent, and quite literally so for anyone accustomed to the regular “dings” of bird sighting notifications on their mobile phones. Ironically, it is a “silent spring,” to draw on Rachel Carson’s 1962 imagining of a world without birds. This “spring without voices” (Carson) is likely in part due to fewer people birding as regularly as they would under normal circumstances. But it is probably also due to people choosing not to report birds, whether to prevent a gathering of more than 5 people (rarities can bring crowds) or simply not to announce publicly that they’re birding. Is this a sign that birding is going clandestine? Maybe. Maybe it's a sign that some birders recognize the potential of social surveillance in their own surveillance of birds. Regardless, this is an eerily silent spring.
