Welcome back Dennis,

>One answer has got to be our different perceptions of color. I truly
>believe everyone sees color a little differently, first perhaps because of
>our retinal/neural setup, and second because we probably even learn the
>*names* of colors slightly differently.

There is ample work that has been done on colour perception on humans that
concludes that women are far superior at separating different colours. It is
well know that colour blindness occurs most frequently in men as it is sex
linked. However, there are strong and mild forms of colour blindness, mild
forms are common in men and rare in women. As well, women have been found to
have an increased ability to discriminate a wide variety of greens. I don't
have references to this work, but I did read some summaries of this stuff in
the past. The experiments done were quite simple and unambiguous in their
conclusions that men are worse at perceiving colour than women. Moral of the
story is to always go birding with women and ask them what the colours they
are seeing are ;-) In any case, here is another reason why the quality of
birding is increased by the diversity of its participants.
>
>While in our hotel dining room, having a leisurely dinner on the shore of
>the Beagle Channel, just a week ago, three of us discussed the plumages of
>a small group of Chilean Skuas resting on the grass outside the window (I
>know I'm name-dropping).

Showoff!

>
>Knowing this, bird-record committees should have a bit more sympathy for
>birders, and birders should have a bit more sympathy for bird-record
>committees.

Given that there are biological differences between the sexes as far as
colour perception is concerned, the records committees should give more
weight to reports done by women, perhaps. Its just a thought ;-)

Alvaro Jaramillo "You are better off not knowing
Half Moon Bay, CA how sausages and laws are made"
- From fortune cookie, Vancouver
alvaro at quake.net circa 1994
http://www.quake.net/~alvaro/index.html