In the big Venn Diagram that models people who spend time looking
at birds we find that some field ornithologists aren't really
birders and some birders aren't really field ornithologist (though
I would argue that the two circles overlap greatly).

What gets people into trouble, what will undoubtedly get me in trouble
for just bringing it up, is the act of lumping. I know some fanatical
birders who, to me at least, bird as if their sports fanatics. I know
some people who think Christmas bird counts would be a whole lot more
fun if we didn't have to count everything.

I also know people who keep meticulous details about every bird that
comes to their feeder, that believe that every Fox Sparrow encounter
should be cataloged down to the subspecies.

I don't expect every birder I meet to be a field ornithologist any more
than I expect every birder I meet to be a member of the Green Party.

To an outsider, it is often only possible to relate to what we do using
their own metaphors and lumping is easier than nuance. We birders often
appear to be obsessed with the size of our life-lists (I'm due to break
400 for Oregon this year) we compare CBC's based on how many species we saw.
Just as some baseball fans are obsessed with baseball statistics and some
golfers are obsessed with their handicap. We drive hundreds of miles to
look at an ARCTIC LOON that they don't really understand the specialness of.
We stop in the middle of conversations, because something flew by in our
peripheral view. We are weird, eccentric and diverse. We don't always
make sense to the 70% who don't qualify (according to the USFWS) as birders.

And this includes some "real scientists". The CBC data is a statistical nightmare
not because it's bad data and worthless. It's a nightmare because every
observer is a variable. We're all different. Most scientists are taught
to control and limit variables. But one can't collect data at a continental
scale and master all the variables. It takes a village to run a bird count.
Ecologists and biogeographers are warming up to this and building statistical
tools robust enough to manage these unwieldy databases.

I always try to celebrate the fact their are so many kinds of birders
with so many different ways of approaching what we do. But that's often
hard to do even inside our community. There's always somebody standing
ready to misinterpret what I think I mean.

So, when I try to explain what it is about birding that's so gosh darn
fascinating to those who don't bird, golfing metaphors are often the best
I can do....

Jim Rosso opined:
> I want to recommend an article in the recent North American Birds (Vol. 61: No
> 3). The article is The Changing Seasons: Signs? written by Edward Brinkley.
>
>
> I have always been amazed at colleagues/friends/associates who, despite a
> background in science, still have no understanding what field ornithologists
> do, and why it matters, and end up assimilating them with sports fans and use
> the word fanatic to describe people who track the comings and goings of birds.

--
Mike Patterson
Astoria, OR
celata at pacifier.com

Gull, you really got me going
http://www.surfbirds.com/blogs/mbalame/archives/2008/01/gull20080105.html