And while we're talking about poorly represented groups in birding,
why are there so few near-sighted birders? My eyesight is much more
of a handicap than being female.
(Yes, this is a partly facetious question.)

I am one of those near-sighted birders. With corrective lenses, I have
20/40 vision in one eye, 20/50 in the other. I first got interested in
birding in college, when I took a birding class. I tried fading in the
background and hoping to occasionally glimpse the birds everyone else
was seeing, but fellow class members would persist in asking 'Do you
see it?' If I responded negatively, they would continue to try to
direct me to the bird, with increasing exasperation of their part and
frustration on mine. I would sometimes pretend to see the bird.
"Oh, there he is! What a beauty!'
"What are talking about? He flew away."
Over the years, I sporadically looked at birds and tried to learn
bird song. Without ever seeing the bird I was listening to, I had
little success. The turning point for me was a ride across the state
with Dick Johnson (a zoologist at WSU) a few years ago. Dick could ID
most birds by song. I figured if he could do it, so could I. The
second important factor were the 'Birding by Ear' tapes. For someone
trying to learn entirely from scratch, they are a godsend; they give
the basis to continue on to the tapes that are simply lists of bird
song. I am now fairly good at sound ID, when I get out often enough to
keep my ears in tune. There are some common birds that I have only
heard and even more that I hear and only rarely see. I enjoy going
out with other birders because I learn new things and see birds I
probably wouldn't see alone, but I tend to prefer going alone because I
get tired of the phrase 'You mean you can't see that?' (BTW, it's my
casual observation that birders as a group have better than average
eyesight and I`d be willing to bet that a disproportionate number are
far-sighted.)

On the female topic: Someone mentioned that women face the additinal
difficulty of being more vulnerable if they go birding alone.
Certainly societal pressure encourages that fear. In 1993, I went on
two week-long camping trips alone, one to northeastern WA, the other to
the Blues. Inevitably, people ask if I am afraid to camp alone. NO
ONE ever asks if I am afraid to drive hundreds of miles, even though I
see less that half as well as most people and find night-driving
virtually impossible. I am far more afraid of the drive than I am of
being alone. That said, camping alone is more difficult for a woman
than a man. There have been numerous times when I've found myself
walking along a mountain-side logging road in Idaho and heard a truck
coming. My first reaction is always to slip into the forest and let
the person pass without seeing me. If the hillside is too steep to go
up without climbing gear or down without injury, then men can hardly
appreciate the feeling of vulnerability when you know that the nearest
other person is miles away as the crow flies.

Since this topic has slopped over into women in professional fields, I
will also comment on that. I am a post-doc at the UW. I have a BS in
math and physics, an MS in biology, and PhD in Botany. I believe that
the only profession with a higher ratio of men to women than physics is
the Catholic priesthood. For whatever reason, women do not tend to
gravitate to technical fields. Although the ratio of men to women is
nearly equal in biology, if you enter a technical subfield, such as
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) or satellite image processing,
my current areas of expertise, the ratio of men to women rises
dramatically. Why? I do not know. Since true controlled experiments
cannot be done on people, I can only speculate. I will go against the
current grain and (timidly, with fear of reprisal) suggest that
hormones do matter. On the other hand biology is so intricately
intertwined with sociology and culture that the relative influence of
purely biological factors is nearly impossible to measure. Certainly,
teenage prssure to conform is very strong, and worse on girls than boys
(Cassidy's motto: men form hierarchies, women form networks.) Many
have told stories of hiding their teenage birding habit.
When I was in high school, I read every single biology book in the
library and most of the chemistry and physics books. I can remember
distinctly the time I was standing at the checkout counter and the
librarian exclaimed in a loud voice in a crowded library "My! You are
the first person that's checked out most of these books! Do you really
read all of these?" 'No," I mumbled, "I just scan 'em for neat stuff"
I lied and slunk out of the library. After that, I tried to be as
furtive about my reading habit as I could. However, to put things in
perspective, I found that coming from a family background where a high
school degree was virtually unknown was much more of a disadvantage
than being female or being a science geek. I can remember my mother
demanding to know why the SAT and college application fees were so high
and constantly reminding me that she could not afford to help pay any
of my college costs. I knew that already and it did not help my
insecurity over how the heck I was going to get through college.
(Mom is, by the way, very proud of me now. She never meant to
discourage, but the idea of a college education was too foreign for her
to think of it as an attainable goal for her kids.) Overcoming the
cutural gap between the educated and non-educated was the most
difficult mental challenge I've ever faced.

Few people, however, are given a free ride, even you white males.
Furthermore, one of the hard truths in life is that no one will really
care about the obstacles you overcome to achieve something. Like it
not, people are mostly judged on results. One of the problems I have
with discussions like this are that they envourage people to feel the
victim and give them an excuse for not trying as hard as they could.
There ARE disadvantages to being a woman in a scientific field, but I
will not elaborate on them simply because I feel that the problems I
encounter cannot be solved by encouraging men to be patronizing to me
or trying to make them feel guilty.
(Oh, God, I'm sounding more like a Republican every
day. Is there something I can take for this condition?)

Kelly Cassidy
waiting for hate mail at kelly at u.washington.edu
Seattle, WA