At Barnside Creamery in Oak Harbor, Ohio, Tonia Tice said she owes a lot of the seasonal ice cream stand’s success to birdwatching. And yet, it’s a hobby she doesn’t really know much about.
“As their birding week festivities have come to be more known and have grown, so has our business right alongside of it,” she said.
Her shop is on a rural stretch of road, about 25 miles east of Toledo. It’s under a migratory flyway, about a mile away from the Lake Erie shore, so lots of birds stop in the area before attempting to cross the lake.
That’s why Northwest Ohio is home to the country’s largest annual birdwatching festival, which concluded earlier this week.
It was chilly and cloudy at the start of this year’s festival. That’s not traditional ice cream weather, but it’s Tice’s biggest week of the season. And the local businesses that supply her ingredients know it.
“When I call for my order,” she said, “They’re like, ‘Yep, it’s birding week, because Tonia just stocked up.’ ”
The aptly-named
Biggest Week in American Birding festival brings more than $40 million to Northwest Ohio every year. Hotels sell out months in advance. People fly in from most U.S. states, and there’s no shortage of gear to buy.
Birdwatching is a $100 billion industry. Roughly 1 in 3 people in the U.S. contribute to that industrywide revenue. If you bought a bird feeder to watch the robins and chickadees, then you, too, are a birdwatcher, in the eyes of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The conference center lobby is lined with booths of birdfeeders, art, books, and tours. Then there’s the optics tent, filled with binoculars, scopes, and camera lenses worth more than my car.
“The amount of volume we move, I mean, there's more and more people starting birding every day,” said Whitney Lanfranco, who’s running the Land Sea & Sky tent.
Birding had a major moment thanks to COVID-19, because it’s an outdoor, socially distanced activity, and birds kept on doing their bird thing.
One popular phone app, eBird, saw engagement double going into the pandemic. Another one, Merlin, grew fivefold. And a lot of newbies go out and buy binoculars.
“We might have those folks come in today and buy a $200 pair, but if they stick with it over the years, they’ll continuously buy more equipment, go to cameras, go to spying scopes, upgrade their binoculars. It just keeps going,” Lanfranco said.
