Tipping has long been an accepted culture in the service industry and was certainly well entrenched in serious birding circles when a guide was acquired for specific efforts. In many cases volunteer efforts by summer graduate students would result in free guided programs where they’d have a chance to earn tips for meals and minor expenses. Going even deeper though I suppose I was well aware of niche subcultures within regional birding populations where a six-pack or other minor reward would be offered to another birder when something was found of great interest to the other birder in a given geographic region. A token of appreciation for when a long sought species was finally found and promptly shared to the community. Perhaps acting as a vaccine against withholding or even not bothering to share rare finds in a timely manor.
I will admit though it surprised me to see these tipping culture concepts make a real jump into the mainstream of birding. For all but the very elite, birding was just a hobby and certainly never treated as an income source. Within my own circle it came so subtly and quietly that I was scarcely aware it was happening at any scale. I noticed one day on a social media post that a Magnificent Frigatebird had been sighted on a northern lake actually perched on a break wall extending out from a viewing platform. The post was as you’d expect for a rarity of such epic proportions for a species a thousand miles from home. What we’d often called a hurricane bird had ended up inland and was now perhaps gathering itself for a return to home. The post ended though with a link that clearly read IDTIPTHAT.COM and a bunch of other letters and numbers after the main URL.
I read it softly aloud, I D (I’d) TIP THAT. I looked up the address on a web search and found it to be a tipping platform designed specifically for micro-transactions in a peer to peer setup. So it was effectively Venmo or TipJar, but tilted specifically to bird watching? Given that the platform was peer to peer and had an open transaction log I opened the link and found that the finder of the bird had set up tipping for this bird find event specifically. A small story was attached of how they found the bird along with some automated details below of the fact that it was one of only a handful of historic records for an inland lake in the state with no other bird ever being refound by other birders. The statements wrapped up with a request to tip the birder for sharing details so quickly and especially if the bird was refound and significant for you personally.
I myself didn’t chase, but I was fascinated by what was happening. I soon found an article for a local birding group in New York City that indicated the app's origins were just a year prior and that the top tip earner was already at $7500 and counting from finding two reasonably rare species in Central Park along with a few other mid level rarities along the waterfront. Standards seemed to exist in the app so that setting up single bird finds for tipping was limited based on regional rarity and survey interest from other birders signing onto the platform.
In the case of the Frigatebird no survey responses were necessary for interest as it was a red alert rarity for the region based on exposed historic records from eBird and the state records committee itself. It appeared features were built in for tip event birds to alert app users based on the distance the find was from your phone's position. It was now possible to monetize your rarities and I realized that the social media post was the users way of getting the word out more broadly since application adoption in the area was likely nearly zero. I asked in the comments of the post about the tipping app and link, acting as if I was clueless for the purpose of generating some discussion. I didn’t really know the other birder, but was genuinely curious how others would respond as well.
The conversation thread was wild and showed a massive delta between the most in favor and those so vehemently opposed they needed to be muted and removed from the thread completely. It was as you’d expect anytime something new arrives. The most deeply entrenched and traditional people would line up to “protect” tradition and the past ways while others saw it as a great way to even gamify the hobby and provide a great incentive for others to share their finds. Maybe even encourage concerted efforts by birders to turn up more rarities to share in the hopes of hitting it big. It appeared to me the hobby was ready for something to shake things up and the concept really did take root shortly thereafter. I checked up on the landing page for the rarity and it had actually generated $275 for the birder after dozens were able to see the bird prior to it taking off and presumably exiting the area permanently just two days later. Perhaps voting on the technology myself I chipped in $5 despite skipping the chase and congratulated them on a wonderful birding find of a lifetime. Just like similar platforms you could attach messages and emotes to the payment and a sort of digital ledger and greeting card resulted with comments spanning the gamut of potential statements.
$10 “Thank you for sharing this special bird. You made this long time state birder a happy man.”
$.50 “I appreciate the bird, but man I hope this doesn’t take off.”
$2 “I can’t believe I’ve sunk so low as to pay for birds now.”
$6 “Have a Starbucks on me friend. Keep it up.”
Reluctant tipping all the way up to deep felt appreciation. This all just felt to me like an evolution in tipping culture for a space that had historically few reasons for it to exist. As I typically do though I started to wonder where this went next and how it would progress. The answer was a bit of a surprise as I saw rapid adoption of the platform within just weeks. Every year hundreds of birders found rare and semi rare birds in the state and they’d just fling them out on eBird or other platforms to share with other birders. Something though really caught me off guard and that was that a very large contingent of the community almost immediately changed how they report birds they found.
The app offered a mode of payment with bonus dollars for birds held exclusively by the app for notifying other app users. Nothing was required for getting alerts and you weren’t required to tip for finding the bird also, but the app was the sole initial distributor of the reported find and location details. Downstream the app even integrated with eBird and other reporting structures, but those details would be held until at least a day later to give app users a leg up and incentive to use the app. It barely mattered that an app user could get the report and then subsequently tell others of the bird's availability to bypass the app use for everyone else because they themselves wanted to also have the opportunity to earn tips on future birds. Even in the case that a bird was very rapidly reported on other platforms, it became common practice to share a finders name and tip details at the same time. Champions of the service would soon comment on social media posts that generically posted rare birds by campaigning for the finders tip page to be used. Groups on places like Facebook started to protect original finders by dropping posts that did not conform to standards of attribution and linking to tip pages.
I would say that within one additional year it was now universally standard for rare birds to be tip linked in some way shape or form. We even started to see less involved bird contributors have a sort of tip funding page setup for them as a way to say thank you for reporting. The platform had an option to send a check to original finders that did not engage in the technology at all with just a few setup details needed. My favorite of them was the first state record Broad-billed Hummingbird that was posted by a kind older woman wondering what on earth was visiting her sugar water feeder in the spring. Once identified the tip spreaders as they became called got her a page and set it up to automatically pay out once the bird left the area and was no longer being reported. The indication was that some 600+ people visited the tip page with a large bump coming in after the details were shared on a local news station. She received in total just under $4000 for the rare bird after kindly letting just over 200 visitors to her back yard for over two weeks.
When reached in a follow-up interview the woman was flabbergasted that anyone would ever give money to see a bird showing up in someone’s yard, but that she was eternally grateful for the kindness and would never forget the time she and her yard were the center of the bird watching community.
Things continued to shift each year further and further from the traditional model of giving out your rare birds without a tip link. It eventually found its way directly into eBird itself and you could actively answer in app whether you wanted to monetize your rare bird find by ensuring sound or photo evidence was uploaded during the submission process. Everything else was handled for you and your account would be cleared by direct deposit every quarter of the year. New contests started to crop up and we collectively found ourselves in the monetized and gamified world of “casual” birding for dollars. Top 100 lists started to show up for each region with number of monetized birds found and top earners for the year and lifetime. All time lists for the most profitable single bird found were coveted not just for the money they earned you but for the clout of being a high value rarity earner.
All of this was a sight to behold and witness in real time. Decades of birding community engagement changed so rapidly that a person would scarcely recognize the hobby just ten years later. Birding clubs would still run guided outings, but they now came with tip guidance and sign off from attendees. Rarities found by the group were the money earning right of the club/organization itself and could only be monetized by the trip leader on behalf of the organization. In this way subsequent chasers were really donating to the organization itself with tax implications being favorable for large donations.
I certainly won’t claim that everything was cut and dried happiness, but it was really impressive to see some organizations deeply embrace the culture to the point that they went from a handful of guided excursions a year to featuring them every single week rain or shine. I had heard from one chapter’s treasurer that in a single year their guided “free” programs earned them $14,000 in tips alone. Certainly some of that was likely wealthy benefactors choosing to give via bird tips rather than just writing a check as an annual donation, but it was amazing to watch the shift and what money directed in this way could achieve.
My natural assumption was that some critical aspect of giving away rare bird finds to others changing over to tip culture would fundamentally break the hobby in some way, but it really didn’t. In many ways for the vast majority of birders the scales were pretty balanced or perhaps titled only slightly out of their favor since most people had a standard budget for birding in general so they weren’t likely to send out so much money that they’d be uncomfortable with the outflow. Those that found the occasional rare bird often were more likely to allow their tip account to roll over so they could use that money to tip others, creating a sort of zero sum game of birding payments. We all just got on board with sending small sums of money around to each other as acknowledgement and a sort of dollar based voting on the best rarity found each year.
All of this was of course true for the majority, but where most saw a normal minor exchange and opportunity to say thank you with small token rewards, others saw a chance for true profit. It didn’t take long for a couple factions of birders to try to leverage rare hunting for profit. The first I was made aware of was a proactive and athletic grad student that decided to skip summer work in favor of rarity hunting for tips. It became obvious just weeks before finals as spring really got going as rarity after rarity got posted to the platform by the same user. The rivers, lakes, and marshes close to the dense metro became dragnet operations looking for something postable to the platform with some garnering just $20 or so, while a few peaked into the $200 range. All total the leaderboard for the state showed some $4700 in earnings on the year. I had to imagine the gas and related costs probably didn’t really amount to a true profit, but the model was being set in these early days.
I mentioned multiple factions and it wasn’t much later I found out that a few retirees had begun to apply strategy and experience to their efforts. With snow bird homes in warm climates these birders began to focus all birding efforts on rarity finds wherever they called home at the time. No longer were bird watching outings a focus on personal life lists and county lists, they were a concerted effort to make as much money as possible throughout the year while engaging in the hobby. Results varied, but the best of the lot indicated in an interview that they had put up 23 rare tip worthy birds across three states and made a grand total of $25,000 in a single year. It wasn’t money that was going to change your life, but it was a crazy amount of money for doing something you were already going to do anyway. I found myself wondering if the rarest bird I had ever found would have made me significant money or not if it had happened during this golden age of paid birding. I suspected it would have been at least a few thousand for that Ross’s Gull, but who’s to say. Maybe it just wouldn’t resonate because it was a Gull species. You could definitely see the pretty factor starting to play a roll for a chase bird where something outlandishly rare, but drab would generate only a few hundred dollars while a Painted Bunting might generated six or seven thousand from the same community of people. This all appeared to be because the hard core contingent was nowhere near as legion as the more casual set that existed at the fringes of the hobby.
So that is what happened. Tipping came and stayed in the birding community. It became deeply entrenched in a very short period of time, but many iterations of improvement and variation spun off from that initial tipping link that I saw for a Frigatebird. Like many others I kept a pretty even balance for years, looking to reward others while occasionally gaining some coin for my own efforts. Not really needing the money helped I suppose and it was more fun for me to drop $10 to $20 dollars on someone for a meal as a reward for finding something truly outstanding for my home county. I even tipped a friend a promised $100 for finally finding me a lowly Harlequin Duck in the county, the first record in some 35 years and one I missed by a year before moving to the area. Looking back now I’m not sure I would have ever predicted tipping for birds, but I’m actually glad it happened. I, like many others, still hope for that lottery ticket bird to show up that sets the birding world on fire. The eBird and IDTIPTHAT world record sits at $135,000 tipped for a single Eastern Towhee that showed up in England. Silly that a bird so common in it’s range would generate such buzz. A large chunk of that was tipped by a single long time birder of the country that had longed to see one since childhood, but it also holds the individual tippers record at 1,235 tippers.
All of these top level numbers though are tenuous at best as the concept continues to advance and take root in more places. As media outlets pick up on these events it’s become common for broader tipping to happen when a media darling shines in front the of the camera. A 12 year old avid birder on the east coast reported a Greenshank that was picked up by the local news and went viral on social media. He topped out at roughly $42,000 in earnings for that bird alone with the vast majority coming from non-birding community tippers looking to send some love in the form of dollars.
For my own part I’ve kept birding like I always do looking for my own birds to monetize, while keeping my eye on volunteer dollars. I’d long since shifted all my rare finds from my local nature center property to tipping platform to funnel a few extra thousand dollars to them in the process. A win win in my book.