THERE HAS TO BE A LAST OF EVERYTHING: PASSENGER Pigeons, unicorns, Jedis, suppers. One of birding’s most historic and influential institutions isn’t quite there yet, but the phone services that announce unusual bird sightings—known as Rare Bird Alerts, hotlines, or dial-a-bird numbers—are clearly an endangered species. Cutting-edge in their day, these services capitalized on emerging telecommunications technology to deliver news to birders in what then would have been considered real time.
The Rare Bird Alert loomed large in my childhood. My parents were divorced, and my brother and I spent weekends with my bird-obsessed father. While other kids passed their Saturdays attending matinées or playing Little League, our afternoons followed a different routine: After arriving at my dad’s house, we’d call the New York Rare Bird Alert. We’d crowd by the receiver to hear a list of the week’s unusual sightings. That would determine our pursuit, whether chasing a Northern Saw-whet Owl in the Bronx’s Pelham Bay Park or a Sabine’s Gull on eastern Long Island.
The first birding-by-phone service rolled out in the 1950s, and the concept’s popularity grew through the next five decades—before crashing headlong into listservs, social media, and ultimately the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird app and website, which allow instant lookup of logged bird sightings anywhere in the world. In contrast, the avian dial-ins were usually labors of love, managed by a single person who gathered local sightings and recorded the (generally) weekly notices on an answering machine, often housed at a local Audubon Society office or in the compiler’s home. To access the updates, birders simply called and listened to the outgoing message.
Rare Bird Alerts once set the rhythm for the lives of serious birders. The dispatches and the pursuits that followed were ritualized, narrow, and highly curated. That search for the unusual, the stray, the accidental, has now been folded into a vast array of information that makes birding a more expansive, more democratic activity. Though the technology that has replaced these hotlines still
