[audio:http://www.wdde.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/TheGreen-09262014-EnlightenMe-ABA.mp3|titles= Delaware Public Media's Tom Byrne and contributor Jon Hurdle discuss the arrival of the American Birding Association's headquarters.]
The American Birding Association (ABA) wants to use its new home at Delaware City to broaden its appeal to backyard birders as well as the expert ornithologists with whom it is often identified.
The group opened its national headquarters, the former Central Hotel on Clinton Street, with its annual meeting on Sunday, and signaled that it hopes that being in the heart of one of America’s richest birding areas will help it become more inclusive.
“ABA sometimes gets associated with globe-trotting birding, with trips to the westernmost Aleutians in search of wind-blown rarities,” President Jeff Gordon told Delaware Public Media. “That’s part of what we do but I like the fact that this region and this area can be emblematic of how birding can fit into every day. Maybe you just have 20 minutes on your lunch break to walk outside.”
Gordon and the ABA board are aiming to add at least 3,000 members to the 12,000 who already belong to the group from across the U.S. and several dozen overseas countries. With its new position on the bird-rich Delaware Bay, and amid the populous mid-Atlantic region, officials hope that they will be in a better position to expand than they were in their previous home in Colorado.
At Delaware City, the group plans to advance its mission as a conservator of bird habitat by encouraging people to visit the Delaware Bayshore, the coastline south to Cape Henlopen that is also being promoted by the State of Delaware as a valuable natural resource.
Birders and other nature lovers might not know that Delaware City lies at the northern end of an area that includes two national wildlife refuges – Bombay Hook and Prime Hook -- and other protected areas such as Mispillion Harbor and Milford Neck, Gordon said.
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“I really would like Delaware City to function as a kind of northern gateway to that Bayshore,” he said. “You can drive right by and never really know that there’s a town here.
“But you drive down Clinton Street, you see the river and the water and Fort Delaware across the way, and you just kind of let out a breath, your blood pressure drops a couple of points.”
Gordon endorsed an inclusive approach to ecotourism, as promoted by the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control under former secretary Collin O’Mara.
“DNREC and the state are trying to come up with a 21st century vision that respects the traditional audiences that have used and supported these natural areas but also loops in other groups like nature photographers, mountain bikers and kayakers,” he said.
The state is paying the ABA $50,000 to help with the move, and sees the money as an investment in both conservation and economic growth, said Karen Bennett, DNREC’s Bayshore Initiative Coordinator
“The ABA didn’t have the financial means to make the move,” Bennett said. “We thought long and hard about it but in the end it was such a unique opportunity. It’s not like we have major national organizations knocking on our door saying they want to move to Delaware.”
State officials are looking for the ABA’s help in promoting the Bayshore by offering field trips, distributing printed guides, lending binoculars, and assigning expert birders who can help visitors enjoy the region.
“We want to engage not just people who consider themselves birders but people who like to be outdoors and want to know more about what they are seeing,” Bennett said.
By increasing public exposure to the Bayshore, officials hope they will also be able to build support for measures to protect it from the effects of climate change like sea-level rise and bigger storms, Bennett said.
She predicted that the partnership will be up and running in six to nine months, and that its first project could be the spring shorebird migration, an event that already attracts international birders to see one of the world’s great natural spectacles.
Birding and other kinds of ecotourism, with their typically affluent followers, represent a lucrative market for areas that figure out how to make the most of their natural assets, said Pete Dunne, former director of New Jersey’s Cape May Bird Observatory (CMBO), and now a birding “ambassador” for New Jersey Audubon.
Dunne said on the sidelines of the ABA meeting that many “tens of thousands” of dollars were contributed to the Cape May economy by the recent influx of birders coming to see a whiskered tern, a rare European seabird that thrilled visitors to Cape May’s hawk watch platform for a week or so in mid-September, on only its third-ever visit to the United States.
Dunne predicted that the ABA’s presence at Delaware City will make it more likely that such celebrity birds, along with many more common species, are found along the western shore of the Delaware Bay, helping to spread the cause of conservation, and boosting the ecotourism economy.
“The ABA’s presence will be catalytic, just as the CMBO’s presence at Cape May was,” Dunne said, in an interview. “Suddenly, people will take notice of the fact that they have this extraordinary wildlife resource that they might have been aware of but they haven’t really perceived the potential of.”
He argued that there are 40 million people living “within a tank of gas” of the ABA’s new headquarters.
He predicted the group’s presence will also encourage government to take conservation of the whole Delaware Bay more seriously.
“What I’m hoping from a conservation standpoint is that the decision makers realize that the resource has to be protected on both sides of the bay,” Dunne said.
The ABA’s Gordon said the group is well-placed to help local communities develop their ecotourism potential simply because it knows what birders want, unlike some towns which have been known to build facilities like wildlife viewing platforms in the wrong places.
While the ABA completes the move-in to its new headquarters, it won’t be having regular opening hours for the next couple of months, but when it does, it will offer visiting birders real-time information on the birds that can be seen in the vicinity, Gordon said.
Although expert birders already have up-to-the-minute information about special birds, the ABA aims to help those who are just starting out.
“We would like to provide Delawareans who come in our door with a friendly welcome and good information,” said Gordon, a native of Wilmington. “It’s like if you go to a really good bait and tackle store, you want to get sinkers and you want to get bloodworms, and you want to find out who’s catching what where.
“We hope to help people who maybe aren’t as familiar to learn all about this amazing community and resources out there.”
Asked whether the ABA would be watching for any spills from the nearby Delaware City Refinery – whose activities have prompted warnings from Delaware Audubon -- Gordon said that environmental activism is not the group’s primary focus but it will be watching for any issues with the company’s increasingly active shipping operation.
“We’re going to be paying attention to it but we are not going to be against every industrial development,” he said.
Delaware City Manager Dick Cathcart said the ABA’s arrival is a major opportunity for the town to boost its ecotourism business.
“One of the things that would most help us promote the city is more ecotourism, and getting the American Birding Association has been a huge boost to that,” he said. “These guys are perfect to fit in to that.”