The hashtag is now rarely tweeted at all, but that wasn’t the end of birdwatching under lockdown.

Looking at some Google search data, we can see the pandemic has spurred an increase in curious avian queries.

While a Google search does not a birdwatcher make, the data shows that people are paying a lot more attention to nature around them.

There are a few possible reasons for this, like everyone being bored at home and staring out the window, people spending more time out in the wild with shops and bars closed, or even more birds appearing in towns and cities thanks to empty streets.

We decided to investigate further. This time we used our Image Insights tool to find social posts including both bird photography and hashtags such as #birdwatching and #birding. This gave us a decent idea of how popular birdwatching has been since Covid-19 struck.

That’s a very significant jump. Looking at March to June so far, bird watching photos are up 281% year-on-year. There were 1.8k posted on May 17 alone. While the initial spike is falling away, birding photos are still way up on normal.

Clearly many people have taken to the hobby during the pandemic. And the timing has been great for Global Big Day on May 9, an annual event where people are encouraged to document the birds they see and upload the spots to Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird database. This year’s Global Big Day was the biggest yet, with 50,000 birdwatchers submitting checklists.

Our Image Insights tool can identify pictures of birds, and it can pick out specific types of birds too. So here are the birds that showed up most in the birdwatching photos we found.

Keeping up with home trends

Throughout our daily bulletins, we’ve been keeping you up-to-date on a wealth of trends we’ve spotted during lockdown. Today we thought we’d check in on some of the hottest home trends we’ve discovered to understand how they’ve changed as quarantine measures wind down.

Using our Consumer Research platform we looked at English-language mentions of gardening, home organization, and home DIY. We also analyzed images of house plants shared on social using our Image Insights tool.

We indexed all of the data to the week of March 9 (just before most lockdowns began), allowing us to compare trends over time. Here’s how things look.

Houseplants are thriving in lockdown. In the last three months, people sharing snaps of their houseplants on social media increased by an average of 6% per week. Bonsai trees are the most popular plant being photographed and shared.

Conversation around home DIY and refurbishment saw strong growth for a number of weeks before dropping off. Across the period we tracked, mentions grew on average 4% per week, ending up just above initial levels. This recent drop in DIY conversation may be because people have got the DIY projects that needed doing done.

There were only two categories still growing across the last two weeks: gardening and organization.

Mentions of gardening increased by an average of 8% a week during lockdown, driven by people who wanted to improve their outdoor space for summer. Mentions are still growing, and that could be thanks to garden stores in the UK (and in some states) reopening.

Meanwhile, conversation about home organization has increased 10% per week on average. We found that the conversation was focused on organizing rooms in the home (222k mentions), bills (50k mentions), and cupboards (17k mentions).

For now, all these conversations are still higher than their pre-lockdown levels. The question is, will they all be mainstays in the “new normal?”

Get more in-depth data

Want more research into how consumers are responding to Covid-19?

Head here to find out more and get signed up.

Thanks for reading

Let us know if you see any interesting birds. Want these bulletins sent straight to you? Subscribe here.

Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team