Your place or mine? Exploring birdwatching tourists’ behaviour disturbing birds in a nature reserve

Abstract

To manage for more sustainable wildlife viewing tourism, a better understanding of tourists’ behaviour that might disturb and negatively affect wildlife such as birds is needed. We conducted a qualitative case study of visitors to Hornøya, a protected bird cliff in Northern Norway. Behaviours with the potential to disturb seabirds at the site were explored using the theory of planned behaviour as a guiding framework. In-depth interviews and observations were used to explore why some visitors perform illegal or unwanted, potentially harmful behaviours, and to understand attitudes, social norms, and perceived behaviour control as influencing factors. The tourists visited Hornøya to experience seabirds in their natural surroundings, without causing harm. They were emotionally affected by the bird encounters, which may lead to thoughts and reflections about environmental challenges and nature protection. Visitors generally did not intend to disturb birds during these encounters. However, many visitors interpreted the birds’ behaviour as meaning that they were not easily disturbed. Poorly developed social norms among visitors, in combination with limited presence of surveillance/guide personnel, and strong behavioural control among some visitors (willingness and ability to engage in illegal behaviour) led to occasional breaching of formal rules as well as incidents of inappropriate, potentially disturbing behaviour towards birds. Experienced wildlife photographers tended to show willingness and ability to engage in illegal behaviour more often than the two other segments.

Overlapping use of areas in a marine wildlife reserve on the northeastern coast of Brazil

“…However, in many cases, tourism development is poorly planned and causes numerous problems for natural ecosystems (Chili et al, 2017;Freitas et al, 2016). Several groups of marine species, such as seabirds (Aas et al, 2023), turtles (Hayes et al, 2016), marine mammals (New et al, 2020), fishes (Geffroy et al, 2018), coral reefs (Kennedy et al, 2020) and even seaweed (Barradas et al, 2022), have suffered adverse effects from unplanned tourism.…”

Birds and People: A Symbiotic Relationship in Practice

“…This captures both the thrill and excitement for the individual and also the fact that a considerable number of additional viewers were attracted to the site to observe the bird, inevitably involving some disturbance, at least of the bird and possibly the landowner of the property involved. Citing this example is certainly not to criticise the individual's actions nor of those of responsible birdwatchers, and indeed this author admits to similar behaviour on a number of occasions, but to acknowledge that even the most avid supporter of birds can create a situation not of mutual benefit to birds and humans [10].…”

Eco‐parcel: An approach to identify and describe attractions to support adapting nature‐based tourism destinations to climate‐change impacts

“…Tourism is growing rapidly worldwide (Borah & Swargyari, 2018; Du et al, 2016; Rinn et al, 2023), and its fastest‐growing segment is nature‐based tourism (Aas et al, 2023; Silva et al, 2023). Nature‐based tourism is a tool for economic development, poverty alleviation and job creation, especially in the global South (Bank, 2020; Kimaro & Saarinen, 2019).…”