Race4Birds - With Tim Keyes

Encouraging youth involvement with birds

The Race 4 Birds Foundation offers a “blueprint” for creating bird races for young people. The inspiration for this model is Georgia's Youth Birding Competition. Tim Keyes, a wildlife biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, is a founder of that competition — and an advocate for increasing youth involvement in birding. He says the competition has created “a community of young birders who are now members of the Audubon society. They're going to Georgia Ornithological Society meetings. They're increasing their skills dramatically.”

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Full Transcript

Transcript:

BirdNote®

Race for Birds

Written by Dominic Black from an interview with David Keyes

This is BirdNote.

Birding competitions happen all across the US, from the World Series of Birding in New Jersey to the Youth Birding Competition in Georgia. Usually the objective is to identify the most birds in a given period of time - could be four hours, could be 24.

Tim Keyes is a wildlife biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and was a founder of Georgia's Youth Birding Competition...:

TK: …which was born out of my frustration at being the youngest person in the room at any Audubon function or Georgia Ornithological Society function. And at the time I wasn't particularly young – I was only into my thirties.

From this frustration's grown the Race 4 Birds Foundation, which supports organizations arranging birding competitions across the country. The aim is to build on the model established by the Youth Birding Competition, that's been hugely successful:

TK: In Georgia, it's created almost from scratch a community of young birders who are now members of the Audubon society. They're going to Georgia Ornithological Society meetings. They're increasing their skills dramatically. Just over the last ten years, we've gone from the winning team seeing about 100 species of birds to this last year, the winning team seeing 164, and eight teams in total seeing over 100 birds in a day.

Find out more about Race 4 Birds - that's Race - the number four - Birds, at BirdNote.org.

For BirdNote, I'm Michael Stein.

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Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by

BirdNote’s theme music was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.

Producer: John Kessler

Executive Producer: Dominic Black

ID# race4birds-01-2015-05-23 race4birds-01