Yep, you see it everywhere. For example, go to a bookstore in Seattle and
take a peek at the children's coloring books of birds. The default
woodpecker is usually Red-headed, while the oriole is a Baltimore.

In a review of Lyanda Haupt's *Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds* in a
recent issue of *Winging It*, the newsletter of the American Birding
Association, it was amusing (sort of) to find the author taken to task for
calling the Varied Thrush common and familiar. The reviewer -- from
Brooklyn (where else?) -- paid no heed to the book's subtitle *Notes from a
Northwest Year*.

Hey, have you counted up the number of extremely rare visitors from Europe
and the West Indies to remote outposts like Newfoundland and the Florida
Keys that get the full treatment in the Sibley guide -- or even those that
reach Texas, Arizona, and California from Mexico and points south? While
you are at it, go ahead and count up the number of East Asian species that
occur regularly in western Alaska but are completely overlooked in this same
book.

Somebody said it already -- birds don't buy books, people do. Guess where
most of those people live (and go birding)?

Hal Opperman
Medina, Washington
hal at catharus.net