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The owners of a bird watching business plan to relocate the company's headquarters from New Hampshire to Pasco.
By JAMES THORNER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 3, 2003
LAND O'LAKES -- The bird watching business proves there's charm in chirps and a fortune in feathers.
Ray and Dorothy David are determined to capture a chunk of that change. The couple's bird watching business, Birdwatch America, moved to Land O'Lakes about a year ago.
Its mainstay is the 15,000-circulation quarterly magazine Birding Business. It's a trade publication sent mostly free of charge to garden centers, bird shops and other retailers.
Their profession is no lark: If you include backyard baths and feeders, bird watching is a multibillion-dollar affair.
"It's a feel-good thing and it's nonconsumptive," Ray David said of bird watching. "Fishing and hunting consume something, and right now they are in double-digit declines. Sales of wild bird products and backyard habitats in 10 years have grown 155 percent."
The Davids moved to Land O'Lakes' Pasco Trails neighborhood in late 2001. Now they're in the market for a commercial site to relocate company headquarters from New Hampshire to Pasco.
Unusual for business folk, they want an office location with plenty of swamp nearby. Forget gators and mosquitoes; wetlands are prime bird habitats.
"In the best of all worlds, we would end up with 20 acres with wetlands to attract birds," David said. "But it's not something every real estate person has in inventory."
Bird watching's popularity has soared as people push into suburbs, plant gardens and get back to nature.
In the past 10 years, bird enthusiasts have ballooned to an estimated 57-million to 63-million Americans. And so has their demand for sacks of bird seed, nectar dispensers for hummingbirds, binoculars and other accessories.
In west Pasco, 36 birders spotted 166 species as part of this year's "Christmas bird count" that stretched from about the Gulf of Mexico to Starkey Wilderness Park.
"I've heard bird watching has more participants than golfing, but it's hard to quantify because it's so passive and hard to organize," said Ken Tracey, past president of the West Pasco Audubon Society.
Among those participants are the bird nuts, the type whose weekends involve wearing boots, lugging binoculars through woods and scrawling reports of their latest sightings into notebooks. One such person crisscrossed Florida to tabulate 450 birds.
David admits that compared to them, he's only "taken my first baby steps." In addition to the magazine, Birdwatch America specializes in running birding conventions, most recently at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg.
"The serious, hard-core bird watcher will drop everything on the spur of the moment and go halfway across the world to see a newly discovered bird," David said.
And the Davids hope to be there when they need fine optics to spot distant feather markings or a sack of sunflower seeds for the backyard bird house.
Anyone for a pair of waterproof European-crafted Platinum Class Ranger Binoculars?