Researchers at Southern Illinois University recently tried to quantify the amount of money bird enthusiasts spent on watching “Stella,” a Steller’s sea eagle like this one. Stella landed in North America several years ago, 7,000 miles from her typical home range. (Photo by Laura Wolf, CC BY 2.0 license)
September 12, 2023
SIU professor studies how Eagle 7K miles off course impacts economy
CARBONDALE, Ill. – Nature embraces order. So when a cool bird shows up where it shouldn’t be, that can be a big win for both the local economy and nature lovers, say researchers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, who recently studied the impact a lone sea eagle found a few ago years his way to and across North America.
The bird in question, which bird watchers called “Stella,” had migrated nearly 7,000 miles from home. Stella was first spotted in Alaska in August 2020 before making her way to Texas in March 2021 (Stella’s gender is still unknown) and Eastern Canada later that year.
In the winter of 2021, Stella settled in Maine and Massachusetts, attracting birders and curiosity seekers for miles before moving on to Nova Scotia. Its most recent known location is Newfoundland.
Brent Pease, assistant professor, and Kofi Akamani, associate professor, both in the Faculty of Forestry and Horticulture, wanted to quantify how such a bizarre – but natural – event impacts the connection between humans and nature. Their findings appear today (September 12) in the journal People and Nature.
A big bird
Stella, a striking bird of prey with a massive wingspan of up to 8 feet, was sure to make an impression on the birding community by appearing so far from home. The normal range of the Steller’s sea eagle includes parts of Asia such as eastern Russia, China, Korea, Japan as well as the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea. The population is declining and there are an estimated 4,000 birds left in the wild.
Although reports of birds getting so far off course – biologists call them “vagrants” – are fairly common, Pease says Stella has sparked an unusually high level of interest, with message boards and social media generating a buzz.
“My involvement started as a spectator – it was exciting to hear people traveling across the country to see this bird,” Pease said. “But then my research brain kicked in and I thought of quantifying the economic impact it had on tourist towns during what would normally be the off-season.”
The flock of birds was impossible to ignore, Pease said, and enthusiasts gave it nicknames and even created a Twitter account (now X) in its name. The fact that the COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak at the time also seemed to add to the excitement.
“It kind of seemed like the perfect storm — people were feeling cooped up by the COVID restrictions, and that was something to be happy about,” Pease said. “So many people decided to chase the bird across the country.”
Pease, a citizen science advocate, felt he had to act quickly since it was uncertain how long the bird would be around. He began by creating a survey, hosted on Survey Monkey and distributed across various social media platforms, to measure individuals’ attempts to see Stella.
“I wanted to make sure I was working on it while people had the news on their minds,” Pease said.
“Finally, we used eBird to track sighting reports and we searched Twitter for any tweets about it. We tried to find out as much information as possible about who would see the eagle and how much they spent to get there.”
A tramp by any other name…
Bird watchers have long been fascinated by so-called tramp birds, Pease said. They see it as a unique opportunity to add a new bird to the list of observed species. It’s such a hot proposition that people who chase such opportunities have their own label in the birding community: “sugar.”
Scientists believe that errors in the birds’ internal compass, wind drift, errors in overshooting during migration or extreme weather could be responsible for their visits to new places.
“It may even be a natural dispersal behavior in search of a new home,” Pease said. “A fun way to look at it is as a bird looking for love.”
Whatever the reasons, when a large, charismatic species like this arrives here, it’s often because of tourism dollars.
In Pease and Akamani’s study, people were asked to estimate how much money they spent on travel and eagle watching. They also used a method called “willingness to pay” to estimate how much the audience’s experience was worth to them beyond the money they had already spent on travel.
The results showed that of the estimated 2,115 to 2,645 people who made the trip, the average person spent $180 (excluding travel time) or $277 (including travel time) to see the bird. These numbers mean that Stella generated between $380,604 and $476,626 in total spend, or $584,373 to $731,809 when travel time is taken into account.
“We also estimated that hypothetically people would be willing to pay an additional $139,036 and $174,114 to see the eagle,” Pease said. “This hypothetical expenditure is considered a conservation potential for the species, where people would donate a certain amount of money to a non-profit bird conservation organization to protect the species.”
Lessons learned
The research underscores the importance of assessing nature’s contributions to humans and helping stakeholders make conservation decisions, Pease said. Even rare birds that appear only occasionally can provide important, if short-lived, economic boosts to communities as people come to see them and spend money, Pease said.
“By showing that conserving bird habitats and promoting birdwatching tourism has economic benefits, our research can help people make better decisions about how to protect nature and reap its benefits in an increasingly unpredictable world “Is characterized by land use change and climate change” impacts and other forces of social and environmental change,” he said.
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