Feminist digital ecologies: Challenging birding's masculinity in the Self-Isolating Bird Club

Keywords: feminist digital geography, birding, birdwatching, social media, nature
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Deploying the Self-Isolating Bird Club (SIBC) as a case study, this paper examines women’s experiences of online nature spaces during COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK. The SIBC is an online birdwatching group operating across three social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) which, at the height of the pandemic, reached over sixty thousand members. It was launched by prominent British naturalists Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin at the beginning of lockdown as a digital space for beginner birdwatchers and wildlife enthusiasts to share their photographs, videos, and stories about nature. The group quickly grew to become a supportive community and provided a space for women to offer lay knowledge and advice for those navigating gendered restraints in physical nature spaces. This paper is based on a series of focus groups conducted with forty women who were active SIBC members, as well as five semi-structured interviews with the group administrators and creators. The SIBC allowed for a community to emerge that policed itself in a certain way and it, therefore, acted as a space of refuge for those frequently excluded from birding. In curating a space with minimal conflict, the SIBC admin created a digital space where women felt they could contribute to and celebrate nature. Bridging literature from digital geographies, more-than-human geographies, and feminist political ecology, we offer an affirmative critical account of how online spaces have the potential to enable wider participation in birding communities, particularly for communities previously excluded from nature recreation.