The Fortune Gen Z birding surge has pushed the free Merlin bird-identification app from over 279,000 US users in July 2019 to over 4.8 million in July 2026, as younger people adopt bird watching at a pace that is reshaping what was once a niche, older person’s pastime.
Federal surveys show birding participation among 25-to-34-year-olds has quadrupled since 2016, underlining how thoroughly the hobby’s demographics have shifted.
Christopher Wood, director of eBird, told Fortune the transformation is clear. ‘Bird watching, I think, used to be sort of a very, very niche thing, and now it is a cool thing,’ he said. ‘It’s a mechanism that gets people outside and gets people in touch with nature.’
Gen Z birding surge driven by mentorship, not just wildlife
Ask young birders what drew them in and few mention a bird at all.
Shawn Wallace, 22, got into birding after his college resident advisor invited him to go looking for a tufted duck, common in Europe but rare in New York. They spent four hours searching and found nothing. Yet Wallace kept going out.
‘Whenever he went out, I tried to go out with him and I just continued down the rabbit hole,’ he told Fortune.
His advisor, Robert Buckert, a long-time birder, connected Wallace with older birders who showed him spots and technique. Buckert describes birding’s core strength as its ‘giving and wonderful community full of mentors’ that welcomes newcomers.
‘When you’re surrounded by all these people that take you under their wing, pun intended, and mentor you so strongly, then you just get kind of swept into that,’ Buckert told Fortune. ‘It’s not just the craving for the outdoors. It’s also that one-on-one mentor to mentee thing that people are dying for.’
Jennifer Lodi-Smith, a psychologist at Canisius University, has spent four years collecting birders’ origin stories. Her data set holds roughly 600 accounts, including 96 from Gen Z respondents. More than two-thirds are interpersonal rather than about a specific bird sighting.
‘I don’t have a single spark-bird moment,’ she told Fortune. ‘I have spark people.’
Campus chapters and social media amplify the Gen Z birding surge
The National Audubon Society has gone from zero campus chapters to 117 in the past six years, and a spokesperson told Fortune the organisation is seeing ‘a surge in our supporters in their 20s and 30s’ on social media.
Merlin, run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, does not track age data. Even so, Wood said the app’s growth maps onto a broader pattern: a share of new users eventually put their phones away and pursue birding as a purely analogue pursuit.
‘A percentage of those people start really understanding, learning those birds, and then they put their phone away completely,’ he told Fortune.
Wallace, now Buckert’s first mentee turned recruiter, said he has helped convince at least 10 people to download Merlin and persuaded at least three to buy a bird feeder for their backyard.
