Birding burn out/fatigue (1 Viewer)

I tend to go out more in the winter,love the cold weather,bushes wth thrushes in etc make for lovely photographs,just got back from Norfolk after witnessing an amazing migration of thrushes,crests,finches and the like to report that there's bugger all round here yet on the outskirts of east london,oh well!!!

Hi Rob. I think with birding you reach a point where you are not going to see something new every time you go out birding and after awhile it can become samey. What I've observed in others and in myself is you develop new birding related interests, twitching is obvious but some people get all absorbed in photography or decide to learn ringing or do conservation work. Personally, I've found an interest in drawing birds and in doing survey work. So I might go out to a particular place where I know I can get close to common birds to draw them showing behaviour and it's a bonus if I see something unusual as well. During the Atlas survey time, I would go out especially looking for breeding evidence of birds not recorded in a particular tetrad to up the stats. It became pretty absorbing; now that's finished I still do other surveys; BBS and WeBs which undoubtedly is purposeful. And there is a new Winter Thrush Survey which I'm managing to combine with my WeBs counts.

Patchwork really does my head in some days but I have to go out as I never know what I will see. Just that keeps me going

I have started photography,I didn't want to originally as I knew it would take over but I have tried not to let it,the other day I got bad shots of the arctic warbler because I wanted to look at the bird through my bins,glad I did
One of the plus points of photography is that I show my pics off on my blog on twitter or Facebook and I have 6 friends who have bought optics because of the photos,one of which started year listing straight away and is on around 180 since February!!! An impressive total for a novice,he has really thrown himself in at the deep end and every time I speak to him he is in a bird book somewhere,before he used to go to the pub every night with me lol

My interest is bird film / documentary making. I find that each year, I spend a large amount of time in the field trying to capture specific shots for the film I'm working on. From January to about August I am very motivated, then I find I've had enough! There's usually a couple of months lull, then I get going editing the footage over the winter, which is nice way to spend the dark evenings. I think it's normal to go through peaks and troughs of activity, it's hard to keep up any pursuits at high intensity all year.

I definitely hit the wall when it came to birding. Over the the last 1 - 2 years I've dropped away from all of my birding friends, I stopped posting on BF and rarely went out birding. When I did get out I was more interested in photography than anything else. I find that my interest is reviving although I doubt if I'll ever go back to chasing rarities. I've been birding with varying degrees of seriousness for about 50 years and have been a Piping Plover monitor, an owl surveyor and a bird bander.

A good thread, with very interesting posts.
Some of you don't really say why your interest declines, maybe you don't know ?

I lost most interest in birding in my late 20s/early 30s (distractions, and yes, I do remember some of the 60s), but picked up again and haven't lost it [yet]. One thing I picked up on from this thread is the hope of 'seeing something new': well, I don't ever go out with that hope (usually rightly). But always there is going to be something interesting, even if it's only "usually I see xxx here, why not this year ?".

This thread has some interesting thoughts too.

The sniper said:

Do any members suffer from birding burn out?
I have noticed in the last couple of years that I start the year going out pretty much at every opportunity,this seemed to carry on until April/may then I somehow lose a little bit of interest,.

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We had a very hot summer here in Serbia and singing season was abruptly cut short - starting in June there wasn't even any dawn chorus any more. I became active again in October although it was still too warm. It seems we will have normal autumn weather later this week.

I tend to get frustrated in the quiet season (july- august) when everything moults and starts hiding. I still go out, but end up kind of disappointed that I don't see more, then disappointed in myself for being disappointed.

It makes me question my belief system, as I've always maintained that I go birding for the sake of birding, not because I want huge lists.

This year I've bitten the bullet and had the courage to venture to new places, so at least I know that if my patch is slowing down for a bit, I'm capable of seeking better birding elsewhere.

I dont think I ever feel any birding burnout or fatigue. The complexities and diversity of tropical habitats in Costa Rica never fail to surprise and offer up new and interesting experiences with every trip into the field even when birding the same site for more than ten years. I almost never get a lifer but see naturally rare species and more common birds interacting with their environment and each other in countless ways. Throw in the occasional snake, frog, orchids, and bizarre insect and there is almost too much to see. However, I dare say that similar "holistic" birding in the temperate zone can be just as rewarding. It is all a matter of delving into the behavior, plumage, and ecological interactions of the birds we watch.

I think I read somewhere that your job involves a lot of travelling. For a lot of my working life I was on the move and on the look out for what I could see, sometimes I would have two or three hours spare at where I had worked to and this gave me a chance to go looking for birds and other wildlife in my working hours. Ironically some of the times that I had "worked" long hours were the times where I had the chance to go out exploring in my working time. So when I got home I would be too tired or simply did not have enough to to go out nature watching.

At one time the long hours got to me, but when I started writing up about what I had seen I realised that I was actually quite lucky in that I was given the chance to go to all sorts of interesting and often normally inaccesible places and also getting paid for the time as well.

Going back about 25 years some very good and valuable work on hoverflies of the Peak District was done by a railway signalman who simply recorded all the species of hoverflies that he had seen around the signalbox at which he had worked in The Hope Valley of Derbyshire.

Some of the treats I had were seeing Common Lizards by the train loading plant at Bayston Hill near Shrewsbury. Glowworms by railway at Tring. Green Hairstreak butterflies by the coal discharge bunkers at Ironbridge power station. Red Kites near Builth Road in Central Wales to name but a few, and all the time getting well paid.