The great thing about citizen science is that it’s inclusive. Literally anyone can be a citizen scientist, and their efforts and findings are considered “real work” and not dismissed as amateur work. The implementation of a Citizen Science approach is mutually beneficial for not only those bringing in the citizen scientists, but the citizen scientists conducting the experiment. As Cohn wrote, they get real exposure to the natural world and the scientific process, and those collecting the data gain both data and the potential for future participation from those whose interest they might spark. In long-term experiments, Citizen Scientists seem to stick around for a long time if their activities hold their interest. We see this with the bird feeder experiment, which has been going on for over 20 years.

I was interested to see that the demographic to which the bird feeder experiment appeals is not very wide. Mostly white middle-class college-educated older women, as the article put it. Why would this be? Well, perhaps it’s because of discrepancies in quality of education depending on neighborhood and upbringing. Education, including science education, in poorer communities of color tends to be lackluster compared to more upper-class communities, thus the students grow up less interested in science and less willing to participate in scientific investigations. As for the narrow age range, perhaps it goes back to how people often have quality science education in elementary school and after high school, but in between, the quality of that education tends to dip. Many young people probably have a bad taste in their mouth left from the quality of their science education, so they don’t pursue those interests later on in their lives, thus missing out on experiments that they probably would have found fun and would likely have rekindled an interest in science for them.

It’s evident that Citizen Science experiments aren’t just fun, but really do bolster scientific education. 50 percent or more of the citizen scientists who participated in the bird feeder experiment claim to have gained an expanded knowledge of the wide variety of birds, learning about species they’d never heard about before. They learned how to identify more species and more behaviors, and they learned how birds change through seasons. David Helms’ experiment shows that he has learned about animal biology by studying and documenting the mammals; he has also learned about technology by learning how to set up and maintain forest cameras. These are things that could potentially be learned in a classroom setting, but, I mean, why would you? Why learn out of a textbook when you can learn out of the world that you’re supposed to be studying in the first place? Why read chapter upon chapter of ornithological text when you could set up a bird feeder, study the birds that arrive, and contribute your findings to actual ornithological studies? It seems a lot more interesting that way. I’m interested to participate in such experiments during the course of this class. Real hands-on, direct interaction with nature and with the scientific world is seeming like a more and more attractive option.