IMAGE: WILL CARR
Ollie Olanipekun
birdwatching with a group of Flock Together members
Q&A with Ollie Olanipekun
BIRDWATCHING IS GAINING NEW FANS — OLLIE OLANIPEKUN IS CO-FOUNDER OF FLOCK TOGETHER, A BIRDWATCHING COLLECTIVE FOR PEOPLE OF COLOUR
WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO NEWCOMERS TO BIRDWATCHING? Make sure your expectations aren’t too high and that you take in the whole experience. The nature. The time to yourself. Start slow. Visit your nearest green space and keep an eye out. In time, you’ll find yourself looking up into trees and spotting more and more species. You don’t need fancy equipment: an entry level pair of binoculars and a copy of Collins Bird Guide (I call it ‘the bible’) will do fine.
HOW DID FLOCK TOGETHER START? I was out posting pictures of birds at my local pond and a fellow Black guy (co-founder Nadeem Perera) started naming all the birds on my Instagram. In 10 years of birdwatching, I’d never met anyone of colour in this space before. I told him about my idea for a birdwatching collective and he was on board. Soon after, we hosted our first walk on Walthamstow Wetlands. We posted the photos online and BOOM — we tapped into something that the world desperately needed without realising.
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HOW DO YOU GENERATE INTEREST? Visibility is the most basic way to encourage people to participate. We soon released that documenting the experience and sharing photos online was the best way to drum up interest. So many of us had never seen brown people out in nature in this way. It feels like we’ve helped to normalise that. There’s still work to do, but we’re committed.
WHAT OTHER EFFECTS IS FLOCK TOGETHER AIMING TO HAVE? We want to use this collective influence to have an impact where it’s desperately needed — conservation. How do we get a 17-year-old kid on the estate, who’s never considered the outdoors as a space for them, to be excited about it? At the moment, the very idea of conservation is simply passing by a large section of the population, but if we can get them interested in nature, they’re more likely to understand the need to protect it.
flocktogether.world Instagram: @
flocktogether.world
GLOSSARY
‘ANYTHING ABOUT?’ How to greet a fellow birdwatcher, who’ll hopefully then tell you what they’ve seen — and how to find it.
BINS Shorthand for binoculars — essential birdwatching equipment. Make sure you get a good quality, rainproof pair.
FIELD GUIDE A portable book with bird illustrations, text and range maps to help you identify the birds you see.
SCOPE Shorthand for telescope, which (with a tripod) enables you to see and identify distant birds, or get a better view of closer ones. Helpful but not essential.
TWITCHER Someone who travels to see rare birds not usually found in the UK — all twitchers are birdwatchers, but not all birdwatchers are twitchers.
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