For the Birds: Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze

One in five people in the United States is a birder, yet the popular understanding of birders reduces them to comical stereotypes. For the Birds offers readers a glimpse behind the binoculars and reveals birders to be important allies in the larger environmental conservation movement. With a wealth of data from in-depth interviews and over three years of observation of birders in the field, environmental sociologist Elizabeth Cherry argues that birders learn to watch wildlife in ways that contribute to contemporary conservation efforts on a wide scale. Using what Cherry calls the naturalist gaze, birders come to understand the shared ecosystem that intertwines humans and wild animals, and Cherry documents how birders mobilize this understanding for citizen science projects and wildlife conservation. For the Birds will inspire readers to pay attention to nature in new ways and raise awareness of the birders at the forefront of the movement to protect the planet from human-made climate change.