Re the issue of why professional ("academic", at least) ornithologists
are not addressing the basic questions of distribution, natural history,
etc.:

If you want a professorship at a university these days you have to
produce not just papers, but papers that get noticed, and you need to
land grants from sources that pay institutional overhead. This usually
means NSF, or NIH if you can tap-dance your way into making a case for
clinical relevance. The funding rate for NSF grants in vertebrate
biology is about 1 out of 10. The majority of NSF proposals that do get
funded are not funded until the second submission, simply because there are
so many excellent proposals in each pool that have are back for a second time,
having already answered the honest doubts and niggling comments of the first
round of reviewers. The pool of people you compete with is composed of
PhDs who need to get grants as much as you do, and who are looking just
as hard for any edge they can find as you are. Distributional studies
just are not competetive in this situation, no matter how worthy they
are. If you were in this environment, having spent 5, 6, even 8 years
of your life producing a dissertation that is unique enough to land you
a job beyond grad school, would you stake your future on doing distributional
studies, or would you select a problem of more general relevance that could
be approached using birds as a subject? A rare few make it by tackling
the basics.

Distributional studies and other basic aspects of natural history are
important -- no argument there. But it is simply naive to lambaste
university biologists for neglecting this aspect of ornithology. And I
suppose that for the US, at least, this fact of life explains why there
are not all that many opportunities for amateurs to help out with
research nowadays. But this does open the door for amateurs (in the
literal sense) to do serious work on the basics: opportunity knocks.

(Disclaimer: my first-hand experience is from the furry world of mammal
biology, but contact with birdy colleagues assures me that the above is
true for them, too.)

David Wright
dwright at u.washington.edu