Birding as we know it began in the mid-19th century, when shotgun-toting gentlemen on both sides of the Atlantic set out to “collect” as many specimens as they could. One prominent naturalist, Spencer Baird of Pennsylvania, had amassed a collection of 3,696 birds by 1850, a feat that earned him a top position at the new Smithsonian Institution. (The assemblage filled two railroad cars when it was transported to Washington to seed the museum.)

A few women, including Florence Merriam of upstate New York, perceived an alternate path: observing birds peacefully. “[T]he student who goes afield armed with an opera-glass and camera will not only add more to our knowledge than he who goes armed with a gun, but will gain for himself a fund of enthusiasm and a lasting store of pleasant memories,” Merriam wrote in a field guide that she published in 1889, at age 26. But many men scorned this approach, claiming that birds could only be properly identified in hand.

Naturalists weren’t the only men shooting birds. By the end of the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of birds — many of them egrets — were being massacred annually by milliners, who fashioned women’s hats from their feathers. The bloodshed infuriated a group of upper-class women in Boston, who launched the Massachusetts Audubon Society for the Protection of Birds in 1896. Members swore off feathered hats, educated the public about the beauty and fragility of birds, and lobbied vigorously for laws that would protect them.

The revolt was a stunning success. By the 1920s, Audubon societies had formed around the country, killing birds was a federal crime, and watching them through binoculars was a popular pastime.

While thousands of American women took up birdwatching during this era, men outnumbered them and ran the show. Having abandoned competitive collecting, men invented and spread the gospel of competitive listing — the practice of tracking the number of species you’ve seen and trying to outdo your friends. Men ran the National Association of Audubon Societies, which was founded in 1905 (and later renamed the National Audubon Society). Men populated the most prestigious bird clubs, many of which barred women. Men authored most of the field guides and became the first paid ornithologists.

Since then, a lot has changed. As of 2011, women comprised slightly more than half of American birders, according to a federal study. The formerly all-male societies have been admitting women for decades, and many bird clubs and college ornithology courses enroll more women than men.

But men still vastly outnumber women among the birding elite.

Men still publish almost all the field guides. Men still fill most of the ornithology posts. Men win most of the national birding awards, and they prevail on the prestigious “records committees” that referee controversial sightings. At a typical birding festival, a lineup of mostly men lectures an audience of mostly women. Almost all professional bird tour guides are men, even though there tends to be a slight majority of women on the trips. And while seven out of ten Audubon members are women, the organization’s national office and many of its biggest chapters are led by men.

Meanwhile, women birders are too often overlooked, underestimated, and belittled.

“You’ll never be an expert,” the man said. “You’re a woman.”

“It’s maddening,” says Kimberly Kaufman, 50, who runs The Biggest Week in American Birding in Ohio and mentors many young birders in the state. In birding, as in society, “there’s just absolute gender bias.”

Sometimes, this bias is subtle and hard to prove.

About six years ago, Ardila Kramer was birding alone in Mindo, Ecuador, when, to her delight, she saw a Greater Ani. A lifer, the glossy cuckoo was nonetheless easy for her to identify because it was so much bigger than the other cuckoos in its genus.

Later, reading about the species in her field guide, Ardila Kramer, who was in her early thirties, realized that it wasn’t known to occur in Mindo. She went to the office of a local bird tour company to share the news of her exciting find.

But the guide she spoke with, a man about her age, dismissed her immediately.

“He was like, ‘Oh there’s no way you saw that.’”

Luckily, she had documented the sighting with photographs, and as soon as the guide saw them, he acknowledged that she’d been right. All the same, she was annoyed. If she’d been a man, she suspected, she would have been respected in the first place.

Sexism in the birding world can also be shockingly overt.

In 2012, Erin Lehnert, then 22 and an ambitious beginner, landed a two-month gig as a naturalist at the Cape May Bird Observatory in New Jersey. When a famous birder and author dropped by one day, she asked him for tips on developing her expertise.

“You’ll never be an expert,” the man said, according to Lehnert. “You’re a woman.” With that, he just walked away.

“I was pretty stunned, to say the least,” says Lehnert, now 28, who declined to name the man out of concern for her career.

Around the same time, Lehnert started looking for an ornithologist to take her on as a master’s student. But over the course of several years, three different male ornithologists at three different universities expressed concern about investing in her, suggesting that she’d likely get married, have children, and drop out.

Eventually, a female friend connected her with Chris Butler, an ornithologist at the University of Central Oklahoma, and now, she’s studying under him.

Women continue to face sexism after climbing the birding hierarchy.

In the summer of 2017, Catherine Hamilton, a renowned birder and bird artist from California, was invited to represent Zeiss and display some watercolors at Birdfair, a festival in England. There, she fell into what she initially thought was a productive conversation about the optics industry with “a really well-known international birding figure” who runs a major conservation organization.

“I had made some remark just about how the industry worked and how the competition could be good in certain circumstances for everybody, because it builds a strong stable market,” recalls Hamilton. “But he said, ‘Oh, that’s just ridiculous. Get back in the kitchen!’”

“How does that even come to your mind?” reflects Hamilton, 50, who didn’t name the man because her path still crosses with his. “I was basically making an economic point, and then he completely undermined me and used a sexist statement to shut me down.”