Kill birds or watch Pokémon

Johanna Mehtälä and Timo Vuorisalo write in Trends in Ecology and Evolution:

From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, one of the favourite occupations of Finnish schoolboys was to destroy nests and collect eggs of birds breeding in their neighbourhoods. [...] Several bird species, such as corvids, began to urbanize rapidly only after the 1960s, when television sets and motorcycles became more common, and the interest of schoolboys shifted to these more technological hobbies.

In a previous study Vuorisalo and collaborators quote an author writing that "in many places the search for birds' nests and egg-collecting is a serious sin of e.g. boys of elementary schools. They spend all their free-time in the evenings during the birds nesting period and often the mornings as well on this activity, so that they hardly get to school on time." Another author mentioned that "schoolboys of 8–15 years of age tended to shoot nearly all animals they saw."

The shift from killing birds to watching television also has its costs. Children used to know many wildlife species of their surroundings by name. Now they have a much better knowledge of Pokémon "species".