I'll second what Mike Smith wrote, strongly, Priscilla. We had an exchange
about Neotropical migrants on tweeters quite a few months ago; you might
try to dredge that up from the archives.

What Mike didn't say is that the *attempt* to squeeze birds into this
particular pigeonhole smacks of politics as usual: come up with a fancy
term and you can then set up all sorts of projects around it, get funding,
call meetings, publish your own newsletter. If I sound cynical, why then I
must be. I criticized this concept in the last series of postings, and it
was interesting that either (a) no one connected with such studies felt
they could answer the criticisms, and/or (b) no one connected with such
studies subscribed to tweeters. Probably the latter.

I'm not in any way trying to say that the tremendous amount of effort going
into studying "Neotropical migrants" is bad, in fact we need it more than
ever. I'm merely taking Mike's comments one step further and asking why in
heck couldn't people just endeavor to learn about and conserve birds
without having to rally around a catch phrase? In this case, the poor bird
species that are *only* residents and Neotemperate migrants get short
shrift because of it. And, of course, to try to avoid this, many largely
resident and short-distance migrant birds have been classified as
Neotropical migrants that have no place even peripherally on such a list.
To quote Mike: "Do you count a species if one individual crosses the
Tropic, or goes into Mexico . . . ?" This is circularity of the roundest
kind, great in jellyfish and balloons, not so great in reasoning.

Dennis Paulson phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416