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Using Grasslands for Birding Tours
Chris Benish1
There is a fairly sizable birding market in Arizona. I work for a company that is based in Austin,
Texas called Field Guides Incorporated which has been in business since 1985. Its representative
of where the business of birding and doing birding tours internationally has taken us. The business
supports ten full-time guides, of which I'm one, plus a staff of five, and basically pays our bills and
generates in the neighborhood of $100,000 to $150,000 profit every year. As part of that we do a
few different tours in Arizona. Most of these tours are in some way centered around the grasslands.
There are a number of species which are found either primarily or secondarily in grasslands. Access
to those types of habitats are real important to us from a business perspective. It's to our
advantage to encourage those who have land holdings to at least explore the potential for
developing a birding market.
We are just one company. There are many others. I would guess there are perhaps 80
different organized tours that conduct birding trips in southeastern Arizona and probably all of those
visit grasslands for some significant percentage of their tour. On that tour you're talking anywhere
from five to sixteen people who are paying anywhere from $120 to $200 a day to this tour
company and then some of that cost is going back into the community. In addition, there are many
people who travel to Arizona on their own.
There are probably in the neighborhood of 10,000 birders, and that's a conservative estimate,
who visit the state every year. They generally stay for a week to two weeks and base themselves in
various places-Tucson, Sierra Vista, Nogales, Patagonia and further east. There are a few different
people who have been successful at opening up bed and breakfasts and that type of thing that
caters specifically to bird watchers and other nature trekkers. There's probably some market for
that. It's hard to know just when you stretch the limits of the body of birders that are out there, but
it's a market that's growing. Birding in general has really taken off in the last twenty years. Twenty
years ago there were no companies like the one that I belong to now and now there seems to be
enough of a market to allow certainly three big companies and 20 to 30 smaller companies to
exist.
A couple of examples of other kind of activities that have been bringing some economic
benefit to Arizona grasslands. The American Birding Association has about 15,000 members.
About three times a year they conduct conferences in various parts of the country and once every
two years they hold a big convention in an area. Arizona, because of its position biogeographically
close to Mexico, yet politically in the United States, is very attractive to people who want to see an
assortment of specialty birds, birds found in the grasslands of northern Mexico and southern
Arizona, yet fall be the U.S. They've filled conferences of from two to three hundred people and
conventions of up to 700 people and so there's some economic benefit to the community.
Sierra Vista has gotten into developing the Southwest Wings Birding Festival which they hold
every year in August, which brings in anywhere from 500 to 1,000 people for a long weekend there.
There's some potential for that elsewhere. If there were a few more ranches that developed bed and
breakfast situations, particularly ranches that offered some riparian associated vegetation or oak
woodland mix. Those would be popular. There are a lot of people who are looking for an alternative
to staying right in Sierra Vista or Tucson and would like to get away from things. Birders are
generally pretty affluent people and have some disposable income.
1
Reid Guides Incorporated, Tucson AZ.
333