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Chapter 6 looks at the rise in membership numbers of the British and German bird conservation organizations since the 1970s. The focus is on the organizational strategies that facilitated this rise. Currently one of the main strategies of organized bird conservation for recruiting new members is to turn people into bird watchers. The large membership of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is based exclusively on the appeal of birds. The organization is engaged in a wider set of environmental issues, yet it maintains bird conservation as its focal concern. In Germany, by contrast, bird conservation has become one issue among many others in the work of the organization. In 1990, the Deutsche Bund für Vogelschutz (German League for Bird Protection) changed its name to Naturschutzbund Deutschland (League for Nature Protection Germany) to reflect this change and to attract new members. The increasing success of the organization was made possible by the retreat from bird conservation as its main focus. It has only been in more recent years, when larger environmental topics began to lose public resonance, that the German organization started to copy some of the more popular bird watching schemes from its British counterpart.

Chapter 3 looks at the development of organized bird conservation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The focus is on the factors that made for the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Birds (currently Royal Society for the Protection of Birds or RSPB) in Britain in 1889 and the Bund für Vogelschutz (later Deutsche Bund für Vogelschutz and currently Naturschutzbund or NABU) in Germany in 1899. Concern for birds developed from the transformation of already-established practices and institutions of bird collecting and economic ornithology. The valuation of birds changed through the mass production of prismatic binoculars and photo cameras. Through the use of these instruments collectors’ interest in birds transformed from collecting bird bodies to collecting field notes and photographic images. The widespread distribution of bird tables and next boxes further facilitated the aim to increase the abundance of useful species. Bird conservation did not flourish because people in the newly emerging urban centers tried to go back to nature, but because technology was coming to the countryside. Conservationists did accordingly describe their goal as a progressive one – they wanted to move forward to nature, rather than return to it.

New Zealand is the only country where stoats are serious introduced pests, and are especially well-studied there. This chapter summarizes the historic background of research funded by New Zealand conservation agencies, but important for understanding weasels everywhere, because the problems caused by invasive species are a matter of worldwide concern. The brown kiwi, New Zealand's national bird, is predicted to become extinct on the mainland outside specially protected sanctuaries within the next 20-50 years, largely due to predation by stoats and dogs. Several other species endemic to southern Beech forests are also very vulnerable to stoats. The chapter explains why and outlines what is being done to protect them. The section on deliberate poisoning might look startling, but it emphasizes the need for control of introduced pests in order to save endemic species, and the strict legislation ensuring all such work is done by humane means. The ultimate goal is community restoration.

This chapter discusses the relevance of avian migrant “connectivity” to conservation efforts. “Connectivity” refers to “the degree to which individuals of populations are geographically arranged among two or more periods of the annual cycle.” Recent technological developments such as satellite radio-tracking, light-level geolocators, stable isotope analysis, and DNA hybridization now make it possible to connect the various parts of the migrant annual cycle for at least some individuals of some species. This chapter focuses on the conservation of migratory birds in relation to three major areas: research, national and international conservation policy collaboration, and management. In particular, it examines three programs that have been extremely important in recent efforts to preserve migratory bird populations: species-specific migratory bird conservation, coffee and migratory bird conservation, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refuge systems and the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act.

This chapter focuses on Roger Tory Peterson's contribution to the development of field identification and birdwatching in America through his book, A Field Guide to the Birds. First published in 1934, A Field Guide to the Birds revolutionized field guides as a genre and birdwatching as a hobby. The chapter follows Peterson from his childhood in upstate New York through writing his first guides and his development, after World War II, of a career as freelance writer, artist, and illustrator. It also examines changes in birdwatching as it became a truly national hobby against the backdrop of the Depression and the emergence of ecology and game management as academic and scientific disciplines. Finally, it considers the environmental revolution of the 1960s and how it changed the basis of bird conservation and birdwatchers' perspective on wild America.