Watching vs. Taking.

• Author: Youth, Howard

We are seeing a shift in human relationships with wildlife, as millions turn from taking other species for furs, food, or sport to just watching. In a way, it's a new kind of hunt.

"Get over here ... It's back," whispers a stone-faced Philadelphia man into his walkie-talkie. He's crouched at a campsite in the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park in southernmost Texas. A short distance away, two forty-something men launch into a fervent but silent race-walk. The site, festooned with bird feeders, backs up to a dense curtain of granjeno, catclaw, and other native brush that harbors some of North America's rarest birds. Eight binocular-toting bird watchers (or "birders," as they call themselves) already ring the site, peering through their optics at a brown, sparrow-sized bird--a female blue bunting. Unaccompanied by a colorful male companion, this Mexican bird is the only member of her species known to be visiting the United States.

"Where's the blue?" asks a woman, a native Texan who is camping nearby.

"You won't find any. That's the female," says a Maryland birder who, tipped off by the local rare bird alert, pulled up in his rental car just a few minutes before.

"Yes!" whispers one of the just-arrived racewalkers, his teeth and fist clenched.

"That's a big tick for you," comments his friend--the "tick" referring to a check on his lifetime list of birds seen.

"Look at the warm brown tone all over the bird," says another watcher, perhaps talking herself out of any disappointment at not seeing the bright blue of the missing male. "She's a real beauty in her own right."

The blue bunting encounter, which I witnessed during a December 1999 trip to South Texas, could have taken place in any of a thousand locations across North America. The species of bird might vary--it might be a piping plover or an elegant trogon or a northern hawk owl--but the intensity of the fascination would be much the same. Birding has become one of the continent's fastest growing outdoor pastimes, and it's leading a whole parade of newly popular wildlife-watching avocations: there are also people (and organizations) devoted to sighting butterflies, wildflowers, wolves, mountain lions, and whales. Nor is this growing fascination with wildlife confined to North America; it appears to be a global phenomenon, with large economic and ecological implications.

It has come on fast. Today, some species are worth as much--if not more--in their natural habitat, alive and free, than they bring as game. In parts of Africa where tourists pay well to see lions, for example, a lion that remains alive has been estimated to be worth $575,000. In many cases, where wildlife-watching tourism has grown, poaching has declined. In Belize, as manatee-watching tours have brought a growing income, illegal hunting of the big mammals has become less of a problem. And in South Texas, there is now hope that the remaining habitats of the blue bunting, the small wild cats called ocelots, and other rare species won't fall to bulldozers.

The growing interest in wildlife watching draws attention to a growing perceptual chasm, or difference of fundamental values and sensibilities, between those who view wildlife as a resource to be exploited, and those who share a resurgent awareness of wild animals as our co-inhabitants on a fragile planet. The interest in watching may also reflect a new kind of frontier for human curiosity. Over the past millennium, the goals of exploration were geographical--and strange beasts or trees encountered along the way were seen mainly as curiosities. Now, the goals of exploration are increasingly those of understanding the nature of the world we have conquered. The geographical mysteries have given way to new ecological and biological ones. Close watching of wildlife has led to the realization that many animals have surprising levels of intelligence and social organization, and that many plants play powerful and complex ecological roles as well. In an era of dangerously unsustainable human domination, it is of gro wing interest that many of the animals we have considered our inferiors have in fact thrived for millions of years longer than we have, and have proven to be masters of adaptability and survival. Whatever our reasons for watching, we are less inclined now to take wildlife for granted.

Down on the Rio Grande

Once best known for citrus, cotton, cabbage, and as a haven for winter-fleeing "snowbirds" (people in Winnebagos or Airstreams) from the north, towns in the southern tip of Texas now herald themselves as wildlife-watching paradises. Birders, butterfly watchers, and other nature lovers arrive to take in subtropical sights that can be found nowhere else north of the U.S.-Mexican border. The new tourism may have arrived just in time. By 1999, after decades of conversion to cattle pastures, farm fields, and housing subdivisions, more than 95 percent of the natural environment of the region had disappeared. Today, Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park and other protected areas account for most of the remaining natural habitat of the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

Although birders have been coming to southern Texas for more than 30 years, their growing numbers only recently caught the attention of many local businesses. Now, visitors to the Best Western Inn in Harlingen are greeted by paintings not of cowboys, bucking broncos, and ten gallon hats, but of the red-crowned parrot and ringed kingfisher. A Harlingen Area Chamber of Commerce brochure, titled "Hooters, Hawks, and Hummingbirds," contains alluring photos of the green jay, chachalaca, kiskadee flycatcher, buff-bellied hummingbird, groove-billed ani, and other local birds. Three South Texas cities--Harlingen, McAllen, and Raymondville--now hold annual birding festivals that lure crowds of out-of-state bird lovers for field trips, seminars, and specialty sales, where they snap up the latest binoculars, books, and spotting scopes. These were among the first such events on the continent; now more than 200 annual nature-oriented festivals are scheduled throughout the United States and Canada. "A lot of things coales ced about five years ago," says Frank Judd, a 30-year Texas resident and biology professor at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg. "Ecotourism is being championed in the local press and other media, and this has made local people aware that they can derive income from it. And it doesn't hurt anything--it just brings in money."

Just how much money? One measure is the worth of the only known U.S. nesting pair of yellow-green vireos, which resided in South Texas's Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge for several years in the early 1990s. These chickadee-sized songbirds generated an estimated $150,000 per year for local businesses near the refuge. About a three-hour...