Next year will be my fourth year combining a birding trip abroad with working as a volunteer on an environmental project in the country I’ll visit to bird.
I love it and for me, volunteering is the perfect way to ‘give back as well as take away a great experience’ in a third world country where most of the population live in poverty and can only dream of what it must be to travel abroad and to have expensive items like cameras and binoculars to support your hobby.
This September I volunteered and then birded in North Sulawesi and for the birding part of my trip I was fortunate to use a great local bird guide who’s also selflessly developing the bird ID skills of a small group of young men in his village outside of Tangkoko NP so that they will one day become great guides themselves. Between all of them they have a substandard pair of binos for practise and no hope of having the finances needed to buy a pair. That’s not the only trip I made where it’s been obvious to me how hugely beneficial it can be to donate second hand binos to such ventures – it’s also got the added benefit of encouraging a love of birds and the desire by locals to protect birds and nature – it can provide a small income.
Of course, on my return each time I’ve wanted to coordinate the collection of second hand binos people are willing to offer, yet posting them on is fraught with all the unreliability of whether they’ll actually make it in one piece and whether they’ll be apprehended and happily ‘confiscated’ along the way. Tales abound of such items never making it to their destination. We also did it after a birding trip to Uganda several years ago but never heard if the binos arrived – we suspect they didn’t.
So, to cut to the chase, next May I’ll be visiting Sri Lanka to bird and to volunteer at a project based in Wasgomuwa NP ‘Saving Elephants by Helping People’ project to address human-elephant conflicts. The same group that runs that project, are also looking at how to develop a community based program to support bird conservation especially to work with school children and so it would be great to be in a position to take a pair or two along with me for the project.
Maybe there’s someone out there on Birding Oz who just happens to have a spare pair, gathering dust? If so it’d be nice to hear from you and work something out………..please respond off-list or whatever’s appropriate.
Comments
2 responses to “Volunteering abroad – a request to birding Aus members?”
Agree with Russell that most of us use our spare bins until they die so it was a request with the thought that maybe there’d be one or two or us that didn’t actually do that and could have a spare, useable pair to donate. So I wasn’t planning on taking more than 1 (or 2 pair at the most) with me.
I don’t really believe it’d be too much of an issue to take abroad 2 pairs of binos packed in checked luggage as today we take cameras, scope and binos when we travel and it doesn’t seem to create insurmountable issues – in most places common sense seems to prevail.
Have had couple of off-list queries in relation to thoughts around a central repository for spare binos donated for such causes and I’d support that idea too if it were to get off the ground, as I’m sure I’m not the only one to bird abroad and see the benefits of leaving binos behind to be used by people who could do with them to develop their skillset, but can’t afford them. It’d be relatively easy for anyone going abroad on a birding trip to take an extra pair to leave them behind for a worthy cause.
There’s a thousand reasons we could cite around all the issues that might arise and that often leaves us just frozen, doing nothing, till things somehow change or get resolved one day…………maybe. Sometimes it needs to be simply about an act of faith, doing what you can, if you can.
Thanks for those that responded off-list too and still hoping to source a spare pair or two
Marie
Hi Marie
I hope we can do that – and I think we can probably do a bit more. My old bins don’t even qualify as a spare “car set” any more, and I think they are probably beyond repair. Many of us will be in the same position. Also, I’m not likely to be in a position to do any serious birding travel for a year or two. But what I do have is an income – rather small at the moment, but I have job interviews around the corner 🙂
Birding-Aus members raised our own funds to support a couple of species in HANZAB some years ago. It would be interesting to see how much we could raise so that you could purchase one or two pairs of binoculars to take to Sri Lanka. We might even be able to put a bit of pressure on one of the retailers to give us a discount price. There are about 1000 birding-aus readers, so if every second one donated their spare change we’d have more than enough to get a couple of pair. More realistically, if those members who have ever benefited by being shown around by a local could pledge a few dollars, a couple of pair would be a realistic target.
Comments to the list, please, everyone. I doubt we could make it tax deductable, but I’d be happy to have donors listed on the birding-aus website (with their permission) – what do you all think?
Russell Woodford Birding-Aus List Owner
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