#1166 1900 · National Audubon Society (Frank M. Chapman) · Conservation / citizen science

Audubon didn't ban the Christmas hunt, it just changed what counted as a win

问题

Bird populations were collapsing, driven partly by the Christmas 'Side Hunt' contest to shoot the biggest pile of game

背景

By 1900, American bird populations were visibly declining, and conservationists inside the young Audubon movement were alarmed by one specific, popular ritual that made things worse every winter: the Christmas Side Hunt, in which teams of hunters chose sides and competed on Christmas Day to bring in the biggest pile of feathered and furred kills. The tradition had participants, organization, and enthusiasm already built in — exactly the kind of coordinated seasonal energy conservationists wished they could direct toward counting birds rather than killing them, but nobody had a mechanism to redirect an established competitive tradition.

Frank M. Chapman, an ornithologist and early Audubon officer, proposed keeping the day, the teams, and the competitive structure entirely intact, and changing only what counted as a win. Instead of a pile of carcasses, participants would tally species and numbers spotted alive — a Christmas Bird Census rather than a Side Hunt, played on the same date with the same appetite for a shared outdoor contest.

换别人会怎么做

The available levers were moral persuasion against hunting, or legal restriction on the Side Hunt itself, both of which fight an entrenched, popular holiday tradition head-on and typically lose participation, goodwill, or both.

他们看到了什么

Chapman saw the Side Hunt's problem wasn't that people wanted a Christmas Day contest outdoors, that appetite was valuable. Only the scoring rule needed to change, from a body count to a species tally.

那一手

Chapman organized the first Christmas Bird Count on December 25, 1900, inviting birders across North America to spend the day counting and identifying live birds rather than shooting them, then submit their tallies — a direct substitute activity for the Side Hunt that kept its seasonal timing and competitive spirit.

为什么管用

Because the new count preserved the format participants already valued — same date, same team structure, same competitive tally at the end of the day — it required no new infrastructure or persuasion to adopt, only a different thing to write down. That kept adoption cheap and let the event's scale compound for over a century into a dataset no funded field survey could have matched, since it was never bounded by a research budget, only by how many volunteers wanted to spend the day birding.

值了多少

27 birders held 25 counts in 1900; the count still runs every December, now with tens of thousands of volunteers across the Americas.

什么时候会失灵

The swap only works if the replacement activity offers comparable satisfaction to the original — a count needs to feel like a real contest with a real tally, not a diminished version of the old ritual, or participants drift back or drop out. It also depends on the counted behavior being genuinely substitutable for the harmful one on the same occasion; rituals built around consumption or destruction that has no observational equivalent can't be redirected this way.

后来呢

The century-plus, volunteer-collected dataset became a core scientific record of North American bird population trends, feeding federal and academic conservation reports and, more recently, EPA climate-change indicators, all sourced from an activity that costs the organizing societies almost nothing to run.

资料来源

[1]History of the Christmas Bird CountNational Audubon Society, 2020audubon.org