Christian McWilliams and Jean Rodriguez got amazing internships. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hired them to go on a 10-week bird watching journey up the West Coast and in Alaska during the spring migration.
First they needed training -- to learn to identify birds.
McWilliams and Rodriguez were not hired for their birding ability. The federal agency and a nonprofit group that recruited them wanted Spanish speakers who could spread appreciation for birds to members of Latino communities who, statistics show, use refuges and parks at percentages far below their numbers in the population as a whole. The agencies' goal is to bring minorities to birding.
"We're trying to put a new face to this birding culture, trying to relate younger people and people who didn't grow up connected to nature," Rodriguez said.
"If you don't know the language or if you're not from the culture, it can be very difficult to penetrate," McWilliams said.
They're also handsome, hip recent college graduates -- but are they cool enough to make birding cool? Is anyone?
McWilliams, raised in Spain and Norfolk, Virginia, has a degree in international relations, specializing in environmental issues. Rodriguez's degree is in microbiology. In the car, they speak Spanish compatibly -- McWilliams' accent, from the Andalusian region, is a good match for Rodriguez's, from Puerto Rico.
They're interesting and personable. But they don't look like most of the people who attend local birding events.
What does the typical birder look like?
I asked Mr. Whitekeys, the nightclub piano player and humorist who is president of the Anchorage Audubon Society. He said, "It's me. It's an old guy without anything better to do."
Whitekeys thinks getting outdoors and watching wildlife is fun and rewarding and everyone should want to do it. But in a city with a 40 percent minority population, you don't see many minorities on mountain trails, floating rivers, or scanning marshes with binoculars.
Surveys taken at birding sites and national parks back up that impression. A recent study by Environment for the Americas, a nonprofit based in Boulder, Colorado, surveyed visitors in seven birding areas nationwide. The survey found Latino participation is usually below a fourth of what their percentage is in nearby populations. Participation ranged from zero percent to about half of what it would be if Hispanics visited as frequently as non-Hispanics.
The National Park Service found Hispanics and African-Americans are much less likely to visit than non-Hispanic whites. Asians, American Indians and Alaska Natives visited at about the same percentage as the majority population.
"It's definitely true," Whitekeys said. "We have a few minority people involved in Audubon, but it's not very many. It's definitely middle-aged to old white people who are involved in the environmental groups."
Public land officials have worried for decades about the lack of minorities who visit. Partly, they care because public agencies want to serve everyone, said John Quinley of the Park Service. But they also want minorities to love wildlife so they will share the desire to protect natural places. With minorities an increasingly large part of the population, the agencies need them as a constituency of support.
After a week of training in March on identifying birds, McWilliams and Rodriguez set out from San Diego in a Toyota Camry with a sign: "Follow us on the Flyway." They traced the northward bird migration flyway through the spring. For the Alaska leg, they flew to Juneau and then to Anchorage, where they switched the sign to a pickup truck. The entire journey is supposed to commemorate the centennial of the Migratory Bird Treaty.
As they traveled, they also blogged in English and Spanish and communicated by social media. The idea was to get new people interested. You can check it out at birdtrippers.com.
At first I thought this seemed unlikely to work, but research shows barriers to Hispanics' involvement in birding are surprisingly low, said Environment for the Americas Executive Director Susan Bonfield. The group puts on celebrations of International Migratory Bird Day at sites from Argentina to Canada, and lots of Spanish-speakers attend outside the United States.
(By the way, International Migratory Bird Day happens Saturday, right in the middle of the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival in Homer, which is where the bird-tripper interns will be. Rodriguez said he was surprised at his first bird festival by how quiet it was -- no crowds, bands or food -- but now he knows what to expect.)
The surveys found the main problem keeping Latinos away in the U.S. was the language and social barrier. When Bonfield's group addressed those issues -- with bilingual signs and by sending interns like McWilliams and Rodriguez to spread the word about birding in Hispanic communities -- visits to the natural areas shot upward by 210 percent, largely erasing the ethnic disparity.
McWilliams said its simply that Hispanics often don't have family and friends who introduce them to parks and birding. Research by the Park Service confirmed that impression. Its surveys showed the most important issue keeping minorities from national parks is they never got introduced to them.
The barriers may be invisible if you already love these places, but if you don't speak English a national park entrance gate with uniformed rangers looks like a police checkpoint. Signs in a language you don't understand are intimidating. Figuring out what you're supposed to do in a park can be uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing, Rodriguez said.
"Our Latinos, we have really big families and we want to go everywhere with them." But in park campgrounds, he said, "Things are really spread out and everybody wants them to be so calmed."
Learning to see these differences is important for a lot more than birding. In Anchorage and Alaska as whole, we still have a long way to go to become a single community. We may be tolerant -- kids of many ethnicities seem to get along OK at school -- but beyond places where coexistence is required, our society is not well integrated.
Reaching out makes sense, as these young ambassadors are doing for birding. The dominant culture should do more than open the door. It should extend a warm welcome.
"There are huge groups of people who could enjoy going outside," McWilliams said. "I know I'll never be able to go anywhere again without asking myself what birds are there."
Charles Wohlforth's column appears three times weekly. His interview with McWilliams and Rodriquez will air on Outdoor Explorer at 2 p.m. Thursday on FM 91.1 Alaska Public Media.
The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com or click here to submit via any web browser.