Do Nations With the Most Birds Attract the Most Bird Tourists?

Colombia hosts the world’s richest avian biodiversity, but back in the mid-2000s, when conservation ecologist Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela was in college there, few foreign birders visited. If they did, she recalls, they usually weren’t casual vacationers but professional ornithologists.  

That has changed dramatically, according to her and her team’s recent analysis of millions of eBird records. Since 2010, birders from abroad have increasingly flocked to Colombia’s varied mountains, rainforests, and coasts—making it the fastest-growing birdwatching destination between 2010 and 2022, with daily “tourist” activity on eBird growing there roughly 40 times in the period. After Colombia, South Africa hailed the second-fastest bird tourism growth of 155 nations that she and her team analyzed. Meanwhile, some bird-rich countries such as Venezuela showed hardly any growth at all. 

Yet ranking the buzziest global birding hotspots wasn’t really the goal of the study. Rather, Ocampo-Peñuela, who is a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, wanted to understand what drives bird-loving tourists to bring their binoculars—and their wallets—to particular countries and how to encourage more of that. 

In Colombia, the rise of bird-based tourism has underscored many local economic and environmental successes, says Audubon's Colombia country director Camilo Cardozo. He and his colleagues have seen this first-hand through Audubon Latin America and Caribbean's work training hundreds of bird guides in the country and helping to establish several birding trails in the last decade: “You give a community a line of work that helps conservation and also gives them a sustainable way of life," he says. 

Ocampo-Peñuela agrees: “I’ve been seeing how birdwatching tourism has changed people's lives, so the whole inspiration of doing this research is to put numbers to these things and ask: What are the drivers?” 

To do this, she and a team that included computer scientists and quantitative ecologists turned to eBird. The app doesn’t offer data about where users live, so they assigned each account a likely country of residence based on where that user was most active. When the user uploaded eBird checklists elsewhere, they were marked a “tourist.” That allowed the researchers to gauge birding activity of travelers across the world. Of course, not all bird-curious travelers use eBird (which is especially true outside of North America) but the massive scale of the data offered the best way to track large-scale changes over time and analyze what factors shaped those trends. 

Birds, it turned out, were only a secondary part of the visitation equation. The results suggested that factors related to a nation’s “bird capital”—the researchers’ term for the country’s total avian biodiversity and its relative number of “small-range” species that tend to draw hardcore birders—influenced visitation trends slightly less than did the nation’s overall standard of living and development. And while some countries, such as Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and Australia, were rich in both “bird capital” and in actual visitors seeking to log those birds—others, including Venezuela, Bolivia, Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Papua New Guinea boast a bounty of species but lured relatively few travelers.  

On the flip side, even though Canada and Western Europe have lower avian biodiversity, they punched above their weight in drawing visitors who used eBird—which makes sense due to more overall travel to these nations. Mexico also brought in a greater number of visitors than its “bird capital” would suggest. Ocampo-Peñuela notes that many factors such as birding and travel infrastructure, affordability, visa requirements, and overall perception of safety play a role, too—as a related survey of more than 400 U.S. birders helped confirm. (In the survey, dedicated birders prioritized rare birds in their travels, but casual birdwatchers looked more closely at travel infrastructure and other available activities, says University of Florida ecologist Corey Gallaghan, who led the survey.)

While none of the results are shocking, they do emphasize the idea that building a sustainable bird tourism economy in biodiverse tropical nations requires both underlying development and security—as well as strategic efforts to encourage nature tourism, says Ocampo-Peñuela. Costa Rica, she notes, started along that path in the 1990s and today has a booming eco-tourism economy. As the data suggests, Colombia’s progress—where decades of civil war ended with a peace deal in 2016—is more recent. “You can recover from instability if you have some programs that help change the image of the country” Ocampo-Peñuela says. “The tourists will come to those birds as long as they feel safe.” 

In Colombia’s case, says Cardozo, the government’s investment in nature- and bird-based tourism as a social development and conservation tool has been critical. “A lot has depended on political will,” he says. With the help of USAID, Colombia's government funded conservation partners to create regional birding routes and infrastructure and train local guides, who learned not only about birds but also how to use gear, speak English, and other key skills. Crucially, they also invested in marketing and promotion of Colombia as a birding destination—today, its slogan is “the Country of Birds,” or “Pais de las Aves.”

Lately, not only is foreign bird tourism growing there, but more Colombians are also becoming birders and traveling within their country, too, say Cardozo and Ocampo-Peñuela. And while tourism can have downsides if not done responsibly and equitably, they both agree that Colombia’s birding scene isn’t yet close to fulfilling its potential as a force for conservation and sustainable economic growth. “There's a limit. But we are still in the very early starting phases,” Cardozo says.

And if that’s true for Colombia, it’s even more true for other high “bird capital” nations that have yet to court bird tourists across the world. Ocampo-Peñuela hopes her study’s data can help local conservation advocates make the case that they should.