Hi Tweets,

While being rather timid at entering ongoing theological debates, may I
offer a few empirical observations and a query?

Here's how I've heard people actually using these terms when not sensitised
by such a discussion as the current one.

Birder/Birdwatcher:
--general and interchangeable, 'birder' has a hipper, cooler, more modern
connotation in the same way that 'cool dude' has replaced 'cool cat'; its
day will also come;

Lister:
--one who birds with the primary intent of accumulating observations of
species in a list or lists, whether passively or actively;

Twitcher:
--a lister with intent; a Brit term borrowed by North American birders to
denote one who will interrupt/disrupt normal life routines to add an
observation of a bird to a list--as I wrote to a friend privately once,
"...which generally leads to rarity-twitching which is evidence of an
overwhelming concentration on finding rather than seeing, identifying rather
than understanding."

Amateur Field Ornithologist:
--a bit of birding bureaucratese indicating a yearning for (almost
invariably unearned) respectability: ornithology is a formal and complex
discipline--usually professional but sometimes amateur--not to be confused
with most recreational birding and emphatically not with listing, which at
its purest is a form of collecting. Birding takes its first hesitant steps
toward ornithology when it replaces the question 'what?' with 'how?' and 'why?'

The query is this: after nearly a century, why does the North American
birding community rely exclusively on hunter and British birder usage for
its slang, jargon, patois, idioms & etc., instead of generating its own as
nearly every other activity-group (quilters, dragracers, anglers) has? Why
have North American birders been so creatively sterile in this regard,
especially when compared to the rich vocabularies of Brit birding and
hunters' idiom? What is in the makeup of the North American birder community
which *generically* prevents the development of its own argot? There's got
to be something there, because if there wasn't, we'd be like any other group
with its own vernacular.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net

"She's psychic....we've decided to find it charming."
--Frasier