Fieldcraft Note
Jeff Gordon on the American Birding Association
A membership organisation founded in 1969 and widely written off by 2010, and its new president on what it was for and whether it still had a role.
Jeff Gordon became president of the American Birding Association in October 2010, at a point when the organisation was, in some observers’ view, in serious decline. This conversation was an overview of what the ABA is, where it sat in North American birding, and what its plans were.
The ABA was founded in 1969 around listing and the competitive, records-oriented side of birding: a genuine and underserved constituency at the time, and one that later organisations did not directly replace. The difficulty by 2010 was that the landscape had changed around it: online communities did much of what a membership organisation used to do, the audience had broadened well beyond listing, and the ABA’s identity was tied to an activity that was no longer the centre of the hobby.
The wider question raised is one that applies well outside North America. Membership organisations of this kind were built to solve problems (distributing records, connecting scattered people, publishing) that the internet has largely solved for free. What remains for them to do is a real question, and answering it is what the conversation was about.