In response to Mike Smith's posting:

You're right, Mike, about the obsessed part of it being a male
characteristic. But by the way, when I went to see the Ross' Gull, there
were as many women as men there (not a large sample, admittedly). I didn't
know many of them, so I don't know their status in the birding community or
whether some of the women were merely accompanying men (or, of course, vice
versa). The two women I met there who I do know are just about as likely
to head out after a rare bird as any of my male acquaintances (not as
fanatic as a *few* of the men I know, but more fanatic than I am).

Merilyn, what's the sex ratio of the people who came to look at your
Black-throated Blue Warbler?

And I guess I'd like to separate twitchers as an obsessive category from
the "hotshots" I defined as being those with the most knowledge about
birds. If you examine the latter category, the proportion of females goes
down even more, for some reason. I guess that's why I included zoology
grad students as examples; there are as many females involved in the quest
for knowledge (for jobs?) as males. And why I included number of people on
birding trips; aren't there as many females out there trying to learn
something about birds as there are males? Then why aren't women on
bird-record committees (there are extremely few)? Why aren't women writing
state bird books (show me even one!)? Why aren't women leading nature
tours (I know there are some, but they're a small minority, more likely to
be naturalists on cruise ships). Women are smart, competent, motivated,
capable, as good as men in any way one can imagine. Yet they--for some
reason--aren't motivated to do the things I mention here.

Women have made great strides in getting out from under the sexual biases
that run throughout society. Hmm, are there a lot of great female athletes
and not so many great female birders because in athletics women compete
among themselves and not with men, while in birding this doesn't occur?
Would more women excel as birders or ornithologists if they had their own
leagues? Would this make the competition fairer and thus more palatable?
But birding is not size-dependent (a factor in male-female competition in
athletics), so why would it matter? I recently read that there was a whole
spate of male "movie stars," but that it was difficult for a female to
attain that goal; same reason? Whew--these thoughts take me further afield
whenever they start bouncing around my brain.

I guess I don't disagree with either Mike or David, nor with David's
response to me, which I received as I was writing this, so the question
really is a more general question, and the answer then is that men know
more about birds because they invest more in them because that's their
(our) nature. I haven't seen much written about this in the
sociobiological literature, but I suppose it's there. And I would claim
that the word "competitive" should probably be substituted for "obsessive"
in these accounts, as *that's* what men are. Find the bird, see the bird,
that's human behavior; find the rare bird (search through those 5000
sandpipers), see the rare bird (drive to the Ross' Gull), that's
competitive and male (no offense meant to the women who do this sort of
thing). But look at all the competitive females we read about; nothing
wimpy about Martina Navratilova (or Hillary Clinton, or Barbara Bush, or
Barbra Streisand). Why not more Navratilovas in birding? Is it a
combination of recreation and competition? Can men ultimately be defined
as competitive recreationists? Are we nothing more than that (maybe this
should be submitted to Outland)?

I think we all agree with the very skewed sex ratios in many areas of life.
But after a lot of time to think about nature vs. nurture arguments, I'm
still not willing to concede these differences have sociological rather
than biological causes. I really do believe males and females are
different--not just that they were raised differently--and that these
differences are expressed in the things we're discussing. I wish I could
say I understood them.

Dennis "I can't believe I spent the whole day doing this....." Paulson

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