Dear Tweeters,

I echo the comments of those who suggest that it is
smart to keep a field notebook, and to back things up
in some manner. My own early field notes are long
gone, and I don't even have the excuse of someone
having broken into my car.

In a rash moment, as a young man with everything he
owned stashed in the back of that little car, I threw
away all of my old field notes! All I kept were my
life lists and the field guides with the little ticks
written in them. Years later, I was able to dig up a
few day-lists scribbled on napkins, stashed at my
parents' house, but I really wish I knew just what I
saw on all those field trips thirty-plus years ago! A
few times I have actually contacted people that went
birding with me on long-ago field trips, just to find
out what we saw on those days, in an effort to fill in
some of the gaps--but it is hopeless at this point.

Looking back on that day when I discarded the notes, I
know that I felt a bit chagrined with myself for
keeping them. It seemed rather self-aggrandizing, even
narcissistic, to concern oneself with what birds one
might have seen on a particular day, as if that had
any importance in this world.

Now I think back to the final few pages in John
Galsworthy's monumental novel series, the Forsyte
Saga. Soames Forsyte is musing on what he has
accomplished in life. He looks at all the priceless
paintings in his mansion, and asks himself something
like this: "Hobbies? Is that all that is left to show
for it at the end of one's life?"

Ironically, at this point in my own life, I am
beginning to think that the dang hobby might just be
something around which to structure one's life! In an
effort to somehow compensate for all the years of lost
birding records, I have begun to record almost every
bird I see, every single day. I have been filling up
lots of notebooks. Later, I transfer everything into
AviSys, which I would wholeheartedly recommend to
anyone who wants to record and manipulate their
sighting records.

I have discovered something in the process of this
data entry. If you write down every bird you see, and
you go birding several times a week all year round,
not counting all the roadside Red-tailed Hawks
recorded along the way, then it adds up to around
12,000 sightings a year, or roughly thirty sightings a
day. A notebook is a wonderful thing, but only a
computer would serve to dredge up such a mathematical
curio!





=====

Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch

near Lyman (Skagit County), Washington

garybletsch at yahoo.com




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