Subject: Re: how we see the world and whether we can describe it
Date: Nov 9 09:08:05 1997
From: Kelly Cassidy - kelly at salmo.cqs.washington.edu


The comments about "jizz" remind me of the first time, many years ago, I
found a dead Mourning Dove. I lived in Texas and had seen a million of
them, but I had to look this one up to be certain of what it was. How
could it be a Mourning Dove if it wasn't perched at typical MODO angle on
a wire between two telephone phones? I had no idea, up until then, that
MODO were so colorful, either.

However, transfer of knowledge from experienced birder to novice birder
seems more a matter of the experienced birder's ability to put into words
what he sees rather than global vs. analytical perspective. Similar to the
problem of telling someone else where a bird is. In a forest of
Doug-firs, there's the person who says "It's in the fir tree over there."
and the person who, with 2 seconds contemplation, can say "See the 3
tallest trees against the sky. Go down the trunk of the left one until
you get to the branch at a 45 degree angle. The bird in about a third of
the way in from the end of that branch." I can come up with a
description like the latter, but in the 30 minutes it takes me, the bird
is usually gone.

Kelly Cassidy -- Washington Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit
Box 357980, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, 98195
kelly at u.washington.edu --- 206-685-4195 --- 206-368-8076