It’s the Biggest Week in American Birding.
The annual festival celebrates the spring migration of millions of birds across Ohio, including dozens of species of warblers.
The colorful songbirds attract a huge following: Around 80,000 birders flock to Northwest Ohio each year to watch as they prepare to cross Lake Erie.
Sixteen years since the festival started, the seasonal tourists have boosted the local economy and are driving conservation efforts across the region.
“But beyond that, it's just this gathering of souls from around the world, united by their common love of birds,” said Kimberly Kaufman, the festival’s founder and the executive director of the Black Swamp Bird Observatory. “It’s the most joyful thing I will ever be a part of.”
Welcome to the ‘Warbler Capital of the World’
More than 350 species of birds have been documented in this corner of the state.
“But it's a little group of birds called warblers that are the stars of the show,” Kaufman said.
As they travel from Central and South America to their breeding grounds much farther north, the birds pause when they reach the Great Lakes.
“If you're a tiny songbird that weighs less than an ounce and you don't swim or even float, you want to be at your energetic best before you cross a large body of water like Lake Erie,” Kaufman said. “They want to put down in wooded areas right on the lakeshore to rest, feed up on insects and get that fuel they need to power them across Lake Erie.”
During other parts of the year, these warblers perch high in the trees across vast areas, so they can be tricky to spot. But here, much of their surrounding habitat has been developed and turned into marinas and condos.
“In these last remaining patches of wooded habitat, birds are concentrated there,” Kaufman said.
She’s been watching their show for decades, starting back when not many other people were.
“Essentially no one was traveling to Northwest Ohio to go birding,” she said. “It was like the best kept secret in the world.”
The Biggest Week in American Birding
Kaufman and the Black Swamp Bird Observatory launched the Biggest Week in American Birding in 2010.
It has since exploded in popularity, drawing people to public parks and wildlife areas all over the region.
Early last Saturday, on a boardwalk through the Magee Marsh, people stood shoulder to shoulder, sometimes shuffling single-file when they needed to move.
But instead of the shouts and commotion that typically accompany crowds like this, here, as people angled binoculars and telescopic camera lenses toward the newly green foliage, the loudest sounds were whispers and chirping birds.
Andy DeBroux was among the group. Like many people here, the Seattleite got into birding during COVID.
“I started seeing stuff in the backyard that I'd never seen,” he said.
When human activity slowed down in 2020, more birds flew into urban areas they had previously avoided. A lot of people took note, and with extra time on their hands, took up the hobby from the safety of their backyards.
Now, people like DeBroux are venturing farther.
“I’ve barely birded anywhere in the eastern part of the U.S. before,” he said. “So, I thought I'd make a trip of it.”
The hobby is gaining popularity with kids too. Baron Jacobs, a 13-year-old from Orrville, Ohio, was participating in a student-led birding expedition through the marsh. He stopped to gaze at a yellow warbler.
“It’s a tiny bird and it has these pretty red stripes on its breast, the males at least,” he said.
The animal fascinates him, but he likes the camaraderie birding provides too.
“Did you know that when you bird in a group, it releases all four happy hormones?” he asked. “Serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine and endorphins.”
Creating a culture of conservation
Kaufman says all of these visitors – young and old – do more than make the community socially richer.
“They're contributing each year more than $40 million into the local economy at a time where there was no tourism season,” she said.
Small businesses that used to open in June for lake-going summer tourists now start their season a full month earlier to accommodate birders too.
“People are buying spring birding homes in Northwest Ohio,” Kaufman said. “Real estate implications were not on our bingo card for this thing, but it's happening.”
Now, she and the Black Swamp Bird Observatory are using this economic data to move the needle on bird conservation. They’ve convinced building managers in Toledo to turn off their lights at night so that migrating birds don’t get disoriented.
“And the city of Toledo now, the skyline during spring and fall migration is dark,” she said. “So, where in the past most people had no idea, they'd never maybe even said the word 'bird,' now everybody knows birding is a big deal here and they're more inclined to support conservation efforts.”
And that’s the big idea behind this big week, she said. By creating tons of enthusiasm over creatures that weigh less than an ounce, they’re hoping to motivate people to protect these warblers, so they can keep migrating through Northwest Ohio for decades and decades to come.
