ABA Blog

Bird Records Committees: A Modest Proposal

 

“Great news, honey! I’ve found a doctor who can treat my infection. He practices medicine just as they did in the early 1920s—before that silly penicillin fad became all the rage.”

“Mom, Dad: I’ve finally decided on a major. Anthropology. I love this department because all the profs use textbooks from the 1880s!”

“Can you help me? I’m looking for a new computer. I’d like the Commodore 64, please. And I can get a 5¼ -inch diskette drive with that, right?”

Needless to say, you wouldn’t go to a doctor who doesn’t “believe in” antibiotics. Neither would you send your kid to a college where the faculty are unaware of what’s happened in the past 125 years. And of course you wouldn’t buy a Commodore 64 for all your internet and database-management needs.

But how about the following?—

“We need for bird records committees to function just as they did in the 1970s!”

 

Back in the 1970s, bird records committees (BRCs) served the following, interrelated and interconnected, functions:

1. to maintain an official list of all the bird species recorded in a particular state or province;
2. to provide a quantitative understanding of the status and distribution of a state or province’s rare birds, or “vagrants”; and
3. to accept or reject, on a case-by-case basis, records of occurrence of vagrants.

Great. I think that was great, back in the 1970s. Back then, people cared about “official” state lists; back then, people were keenly interested in figuring out patterns of vagrancy; and back then, when birding was simpler and more competitive, up-or-down Accept/Reject decisions were the order of the day.

Fast forward to 2012.

First, let’s face chronological reality. It’s been more than 35 years since Jimmy Carter was inaugurated. That’s more than a third of a century; that’s more than a human generation. That’s a long time. It is normal—normal and salutary—for ideas and institutions to change over the course of 35 years.
Right: Do you remember when Jimmy Carter was running for President of the United States? If so, then you're above the median age of an American. 

It would be weird if today’s birders had the same needs, outlooks, and expectations as the birders from the era of disco, eight-track players, and Sanford and Son.

We’re well into the second decade of the 21st century, and the idea of an “official” state list is increasingly quixotic. Can we really say that any extralimital American Black Duck is “pure,” and therefore countable? And if we count American Black Ducks, why can’t we count Mexican Ducks? What about Muscovy Ducks? What about Smews and Falcated Ducks? What about well-established populations of Egyptian Geese and Mandarin Ducks?

These days, we just know too danged much. We know so much about hybrids, introgression, cryptic species, the proliferation of exotic species, and the prevalence of ship-assisted vagrancy. We know that practically every entry on an official state or provincial list is problematic in one way or another.

We also know a great deal, these days, about vagrancy. How did we come to obtain all that knowledge? Well, we owe that knowledge, in large part, to the brilliant work of the BRCs of the 1970s. I am, and forever well be, in awe of and grateful for—oh, and I’ll come right out and say it—the work of the California Bird Records Committee (CBRC) back in the Disco Age. That committee figured out when and where to find everything from Tropical Kingbirds to Rufous-backed Robins to Kentucky Warblers.

I’ll say it again: I’m in awe of the CBRC. I’ll also say this: I’m in awe of Galileo and Newton.

You see the problem, don’t you? Today’s physicists don’t spend a lot of time testing the laws of classical mechanics. We know that the acceleration due to gravity at sea level is 9.80665 meters per second per second. Physicists don’t get research grants to reestablish that fact. Physicists have moved on to other matters.

Shouldn’t it be the same with BRCs? In 2012, do we really need ever-more-fine-tuned knowledge about patterns of vagrancy? Do we even need official lists?

My answer: “No.” But it’s a qualified “No.” I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’m going to argue that there’s still plenty more to learn about the birds in our states and provinces—although not so much about vagrants as about well-established populations of breeders, transients, and winter visitants. And I’m going to argue that state and provincial lists—although not of the sort envisaged by our birding forebears in the 1970s—remain relevant in the 21st century.

But first we need to turn to another matter. Thus far, I’ve commented on the first and second functions of BRCs from the 1970s. To recap: Function #1 was to keep a state or provincial list; Function #2 was to understand vagrancy. Now what about the biggie? What about #3?—for a committee to vote to accept or reject, on a case-by-case basis, records of occurrence of vagrants?

 

No beating around the bush: I hereby declare that it is no longer necessary or appropriate for BRCs to accept or reject records. Note carefully: no longer necessary or appropriate. That is to say, I, ahem, accept that this practice was reasonable in the 1970s and ’80s, and even in the ’90s and right through the aughts. But no longer. Something has changed. Something fundamental.

Back in the day, the “user” community—everybody from listers to state nongame agencies—lacked access to the corpus of records in care of a BRC. In theory, those records were accessible: Alls you had to do was drive across the state to the BRC’s secretary’s mother’s basement, rummage through the mildew and baseball cards till you found the committee’s archives, then spend the weekend trying to track down the cryptically labeled Kodak (Google it) print (Google it) of the Sharp-tailed Sparrow (Google it).
Left: Back in the day, Sanford and Son was cool. Watching Sanford and Son reruns in 2012?—not so cool. 

But you wouldn’t really do that. Of course not. Instead, you would rely on the committee to do all the work for you. Your basic question boiled down to this: Was it a “Sharp-tailed Sparrow,” or wasn’t it? And the committee had the answer to your question: Yes or No. Those Yes/No (Accept/Reject) votes were published every other year or so in state or provincial ornithological journals, and they were the foundation of the user community’s understanding of the status and distribution of regional rarities.

That was then.

Today it is trivially easy to put it all on the internet. The slide of the “Sharp-tailed Sparrow”?—make a scan and get it online. The written description and field sketches?—same thing. The audio recording?—create a soundfile and upload. Piece of cake.

Next step: The user visits the BRC’s website, tracks down the record, and reviews the data. The something catches her eye: a record in a nearby marsh of a Demoiselle Crane.

Her determinations: The sparrow may well have referred to what we today call Nelson’s Sparrow, but the user isn’t convinced. As to the crane, however, she believes the bird to have been a naturally occurring vagrant, not an escape from captivity.

Of some interest is that our hypothetical user’s determinations are precisely the opposite of the committee’s. In a not-quite-unanimous vote, the committee accepted the sparrow; but our user’s standard of evidence was evidently different. In a split vote, however, the committee rejected the crane; but the user sided with those committee members who accepted the crane.

Folks, that’s totally fine.

Different users have different needs. Our models and methods differ, user by user. Our knowledge and understanding are constantly evolving; we know more about Ammodramus sparrow ID and crane vagrancy than we did in the old days. And the culture’s changing: Slowly but surely, we’re embracing a more probabilistic view of the material universe. The old black-and-white (cf. Accept/Reject) worldview is being supplanted by one that is more interested in and tolerant of shades of gray.

If only FOX News would get into the business of archiving bird records. “We report, You decide”—that’s actually a great idea for advancing our understanding of avian status and distribution.

 

Here’s my vision for records committees in 2012 and beyond.

• First, Put it all online. I mean, All of it: the record (“accession”) number, the photos and audio, the written description and field sketches. Make it searchable. And create a “comments” field
• From time to time, update summary accounts of all species reported to have occurred within the state or province. Some species will be those that we traditionally have thought of as BRC fare: Demoiselle Cranes and Nelson’s Sparrows in California, and so forth. But there will be a great deal more. The California accounts would include entries for Nutmeg Mannikin and Orange Bishop, for Rose-ringed Parakeet and Lilac-crowned Parrot. Ditto for Black-footed Albatross, Anna’s Hummingbird, and Black Phoebe.
• Finally, and this is the biggie: No voting.

I’ve already said it: Until recently, voting was important for the scientists and listers who value an archival record of the occurrence of birds in a state, province, or other region of interest. Today, however, we have the internet. We have—or we ought to have—all that information at our fingertips. In the old days, all we had was a simple Yes/No decision: Sharp-tailed Sparrow–Accept, Demoiselle Crane–Reject, etc. Today, we can look at photos, listen to audio, examine the observers’ field notes, and review other users’ comments.
Right: People danced in the 1970s. People still dance in 2012. But they don't dance in 2012 the same way they danced in the ’70s.

Am I saying that BRCs are irrelevant in 2012? Absolutely not. They’re more important than ever, and, man, do they have their work cut out for them!

Basically, I’m picturing a committee in which all members serve as non-voting secretaries. In this scenario, all members would be involved in database management. All members would coauthor regularly updated accounts of the status and distribution of all species reported to have occurred within the state, province, or region of interest. (And I hasten to point out that compendia of such “accounts” would be book-length treatises that any university press would be proud to publish.) And all members would engage in some amount of “customer relations”—that is to say, broad engagement of the birding community.

Wow.

What an incredible service these rejiggered records committees would provide. And the birding community would know it. And recognize it. And appreciate it. And be grateful for it.

That would be a big change.

I’d like to close now on that note.

 

I can anticipate an instant objection to the scenario I laid out above. I can imagine you’re saying: “Put it all online—fine. Create annotated lists not just of rarities but of all species—great. Voting—what’s the harm?”

As my sister likes to say, Allow me to answer that question with a question: “What’s the point?”

Seriously, what’s the point?

It’s “science,” right? According to a certain perspective, voting yields a “scientific” record of the occurrence of rare birds. But could there be another reason for voting?

Enter the 800-lb. gorilla in the room.

Talk to anybody who’s been birding for a while—heck, talk to anybody who’s been birding for an hour—and you’ll be informed that the true function of a BRC is to police birders’ lists. Oh, I can hear the howls of protest already. What can I say?—Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
Left: BRCs meet regularly and evaluate records of avian occurrence. 

Now let’s be fair here: Innocent until proven guilty. Let’s say BRCs truly are 100% science, 0% list police. Nevertheless, the all-important perception remains. Everywhere I go, I encounter the same sentiment: BRCs are self-proclaimed list police.

I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m not saying it’s true. But I am indeed most emphatically and categorically stating that it is a widely held belief that BRCs are list police.

It’s a real pain in the butt for BRCs.

But it doesn’t have to be.

If BRCs got out of this archaic Yes/No (“Accept/Reject”) mode, the whole problem would instantly vanish. The “list police” charge would go out the window. Committees would be unencumbered at last to do science, and science alone.

BRC stock would soar. BRCs would be “good guys,” right up there with The Nature Conservancy, the ABA’s young birder programs, motherhood, and apple pie. BRCs would inspire birders to learn more about avian status and distribution—knowledge of which is more important than ever in this era of accelerating habitat change and human population growth.

Sound good? Yes, but the following has to happen: BRCs have to get out of the list police business. I know, I know...it’s not fair. BRCs don’t really police people’s lists. But as long as BRCs maintain “official” lists and vote on records, that all-important perception will persist. And that perception—whether or not it’s fair—will prevent BRCs from playing an important role in informing management actions and conservation policy in the 21st century.

 

* * * * * 

 

Addendum:

Below I present four screen-captures from the interactive California Bird Records Committee website. Scroll down into the "Comments" section, please, for further thoughts. But, first, a tease: These four screen-captures point to a magnficient functionality for bird records committees in 2012 and beyond. More on that below; here now are the images:

 

Fig. 1a. Rufous-backed Robin query.

 

Fig. 1b. Rufous-backed Robin results.

 

 

Fig. 2a. Demoiselle Crane query.

 

 

Fig. 2b. Demoiselle Crane results.

How the Harlequin Duck Lost His Life

The title of this post is meant to mark it as the less cheery companion to the May 2012 Birding magazine article, "How the Harlequin Duck Got His Spots." That article, if you haven't yet read it, is a really wonderful piece of birder ornithology, the work of passionate amateurs that measurably advances our understanding of the processes behind the creation of one of Nature's masterpieces: the gaudy, gorgeous plumage of drake Harlequin Ducks.

Built around a series of ten photos by Paul Higgins and text by Keith Evans that follows a hatch year male Harlequin over a pivotal 2 months in his life, during which he goes from looking very much like his Mom to very much like his Dad. The first and last shots in that sequence are shown below. (Note: Higgins' photos are much better looking in the magazine than they are in the crummy scans I did for this post.)

 

 This insight was possible for two main reasons. One, there were some birders who were interested enough to watch and photograph this bird (actually, there were 3 Harlequins present, but the article focuses on Harley One, as they called him) over several months. Two, there were confiding Harlequin Ducks hanging out in an accesible location that could be easily revisited, in this case the Antelope Island causeway just north of Salt Lake City, Utah.

View Larger Map

The story takes what many, but not all, will consider a darker turn from here.

I will leave it to those who know the particulars better than I to fill in more detail but the gist of it is this: not long after that last November 25 photo was taken, the Harlequin Ducks were shot and killed by a hunter or hunters. That's how Harley One, so soon after getting his spots, lost his life.

There are a couple of other things worth mentioning in framing what I hope will be a productive discussion in the comments section. It was legal for the hunter(s) to shoot Harlequin Ducks, unquestionably. Though many birders in areas where Harlequin Ducks are rare might find the thought of Harley hunting foreign, even a bit hard to picture, a quick Google image search on Harlequin Duck Hunting will return plenty of evidence that it does occur.

Further, it was apparently legal for the birds to be shot from Antelope Island causeway, though, again, that might come as a surprise to many, given that it is a fairly heavily trafficked road just outside a major metropolitan area.

Finally, there is at least suspicion, and again I hope those closer to the events will chime in, that the hunters heard of the ducks' presence on the causeway by reading a birding e-mail list. I would like to have this assertion definitively proved or disproved, but such may not be possible.

Here are a few points I'd like us to discuss, for starters:

1. Though I find that bird hunters and birders generally want the same basic thing, good bird populations and habitat, this is a case where the interests of a very few hunters completely trumped the interests of a much larger number of birders. (Or maybe I've got that wrong—maybe the interests of the entire hunting community were served by just one or two individuals getting to shoot those ducks? It's important to get the questions right if we're to have any hope of finding good answers.) What, if anything, are we to do about this, to lessen the chances that it happens again?

2. What, if any, legal or ethical restrictions are there or ought there be on those who would harvest, for science or for sport, wild birds that are likely to be seen, enjoyed, and even studied by many more people, if they are left alive?

3. What, if any, restrictions should we place on the sharing of bird locations among our community, knowing that such information may from time to time result in harm coming to those birds, whether from birders, photographers, hunters, or ornithologists?

4. How would you like to see the American Birding Association respond to situations like this? How should our Code of Ethics be revised or appended to address them?

5. This winter, quite a few people got very, very upset at the actions of photographers flushing Snowy Owls in attempts to photograph them. How is this incident the same or different, worse or better?

Hunters and hunting, and their relationships to birders, birding, and conservation is certainly one of those topics that can generate more heat than light. Though I'm not asking anyone to pull any punches, I do ask that commenters keep their tone civil and respectful. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts and feelings.

Birding with Children

 

Giving parenting advice, I realize, can be a great way to make enemies. Just ask any mother-in-law. Better yet, just ask the recipient of any such advice: Ask any daughter-in-law. For sure, the dispensers of parenting advice—from Amy Shua to Focus on the Family to mothers-in-law everywhere—are generally hated.

Same thing, I have found, with the purveyors of birding advice. Try telling a non-lister that keeping lists is a great way to learn avian status and distribution; or explain to a chaser that you’d rather spend time at your local patch than make the eight-hour drive for a state first. Or try telling any sort of birder that he or she might have blown an ID...

And now I’m going to offer my views on both birding and parenting. I wonder if I’ll have any friends at all when this is done.
Right: On the trail in Colorado’s San Luis Valley; we’ve just seen several hundred American alligators (it’s complicated...) and a rare Mexican Duck.

To cut to the chase, I have one and only one item of advice for birding parents.

First, a brief digression.

 

Consider the following scenario. You’re in idle conversation with a friend—the sort of casual chitchat that happens dozens of times every day. It’s a conversation that, ordinarily, would be forgotten the next morning. Then your friend says something that hits you like a ton of bricks. Oh, it’s not intended as such. Indeed, your friend has already forgotten it a moment or two later. But it’s received and processed in such a manner as to be life-changing.

Come to think of it, I posted quite recently to The ABA Blog about precisely this matter. I wrote about how a birding companion, Chris Wood, casually remarked to me, “Listen to the Green-winged Teal.” I’m pretty sure he didn’t intend for that comment to alter the way I go birding. In fact, I suspect Chris had forgotten within minutes that he’d even uttered the remark. No matter, it changed my life.

The same thing happened, a while back, in the course of conversation with Virginia Maynard, well known to many ABA members for her great work through the years with ABA bird-finding guides, Winging It, and other publications. Virginia’s kids were teenagers at the time, and my first child was on the way. We’d gotten onto the topic of birding and children, and Virginia said something that’s stuck with me ever since. I suspect Virginia had forgotten the conversation within hours. But I’ll always remember what she told me.
Left: Watching for seabirds off Monterey, California.

 

“Start ’em young.”

That’s it? That’s all? That’s all she said? And that’s the entirety of my advice to birders with children?
Right: pondering geographic variation in the “white-cheeked goose” complex.

Yes, that’s it. That’s all there is to it. But there’s just one thing. We need to define “young.” You see, Virginia wasn’t talking about high school, or junior high, or even kindergarten.

That’s way too late.

 

My daughter and I spent a good part of her first day of life at the hospital window. We saw a Golden Eagle fly by, and we listened to coyotes warbling. The next few weeks, we explored the canyons, marshes, and mesas near our home in Boulder County, Colorado. We took our first out-of-state birding trip when my daughter was three months old; with Rick Wright, we birded around Tucson, Arizona, finding such regional specialties as Abert’s Towhee and Gila Woodpecker—plus a locally uncommon Swamp Sparrow. You get the picture.

My son got an even earlier start. He and I had wandered out onto a hospital balcony within two hours of his birth. (Long story, but it involved an impending blizzard, a scarcity of doctors and nurses, and a bit of a “misunderstanding” about restricted areas in the hospital.) It was nearly midnight, so my son and I tried for Great Horned Owl. A few days later, he and I and his big sister got Eastern Screech-Owl for the Boulder Christmas Bird Count. The bird was a “save”—the only one recorded for the count.
Above: Returning from High Creek Fen, in Colorado’s high country.

 

Let me clear about something. I’m talking about serious birding, “real” birding, hardcore birding.

A few years ago, when my kids were toddlers, we were birding in a blinding spring snowstorm at a local reservoir. We found a Ruff. My daughter knew what to do. She had me stay with the bird, and she raced back to the car for my cell phone.
Right: In this photo, she’s barely one year old. Today’s kids are born knowing how to use technology in the interest of furthering the cause of birding.

When my son was seven months old, he co-discovered with me the mid-summer nocturnal molt-migration of arizonae Chipping Sparrows. The discovery wouldn’t have happened without him. You see, I would have slept through those hot summer nights if it weren’t for my son’s nocturnal stirrings. But he stirred, I woke up, we went birding together in the middle of the night, and the rest is history.

My kids are a bit older now, and their ambitions are accordingly grander. The other day, my daughter learned that I’ll be camping and birding later this month in the remote canyonlands of the Colorado–New Mexico border; she’ll be there too, I’ve just been informed. Meanwhile, my son is angling for a birding trip to India.

What’s next?

 

In a nutshell, I don’t know. I’m typing this from the sidelines at my son’s soccer game. After the game, my daughter (also playing soccer right now) and son are meeting up for a visit at a computer store in Boulder.

I don’t know if my kids will continue as birders. They’re increasingly interested in Taylor Swift and the diabolical union of Star Wars and Legos. (They’re also interested in, and knowledgeable about, number theory and The Great Fugue; my wife and I still exert some influence over them…) A few years from now, when they’re teenagers, my kids may have as little interest in birding as I have in shopping, television, politics, and cooking.
Left: Working up the day’s checklist.

That’s fine. If that happens, I’m fine with it. Such an outcome would mean, in some sense, that I’d get my life—or, at least my birding life—back to normal. I’d be back to birding the way I did it in grade school, college, grad school, and early adulthood.

And if that happens, here’s the big question: Will I be able to sustain the turbo-charged pace of birding from my earliest years as a parent? Let’s not beat around the bush: I got more intensely into birding—way more into birding—when my daughter was born. And I cranked it up a few notches further with the birth of my son. Will I be able to keep it up? Or will I go back to the comparatively subdued birding tempo from my teens and twenties? I wonder.
Right: A close encounter on a backcountry road.

 

Here comes the preachy part. (Cf. Amy Shua, Focus on the Family, mothers-in-law everywhere.) I’ve come to realize that are two prevalent courses of action for birders with young children. Course of action #1: Just clock out for 10 years; simply stop birding while the kids are young. Course of action #2: Keep on birding while the kids are young, but do it on your own time.

All I can say is: What a pity. Even: What a waste. What could be more wholesome for youngsters—grade-schoolers and preschoolers, toddlers and infants, even newborns—than going birding? Mind you, it’s not the birding per se that’s wholesome. Rather, it’s the experience of beholding, interacting with, and beginning to understand the whole wide world. Young children who go birding get to see blue whales and dawn redwoods, snowstorms in the Rockies and thunderstorms in the Sonoran Desert, rattlesnakes on the prairie and sunrise at Montauk Point.
Above: A visit to the Department of Zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

But never mind them. What about me? I’ll say it again: Since becoming a parent, I’ve done more birding, seen better birds, and simply enjoyed birding more than ever before.

And remember, the kids aren’t even teenagers yet.

Folks, don’t wait for the kids to be “old enough”—whatever that means. Just do it. Just strap ’em in, buckle ’em up, and go. Go for it.

 

I started out by saying it’s perhaps not the smartest thing to proffer advice on birding, parenting, or especially birding and parenting. Well, don’t blame me!—this was all Virginia Maynard’s idea. And a few other folks: Betsy Blakeslee; Michael and Andrea Banks; and, nearly 30 years ago, Bill Fink. If you’re one of the aforementioned persons, you’re doubtless scratching your head right now. Regardless, you said something—in passing, and casually so—that stuck with me. You made a difference. You played an important role in ushering in the greatest years of my life.
Right: Good Times! Birding with children is a great way of getting your name in the police blotter in small towns all across America. (Check out the incident at 6:48 a.m.)

 

iEtiquette

 

You’re not going to believe this, but I’m going to be exceedingly brief in this blog post. Here’s the deal: I’d like you to click on this link to a .PDF of Diana Doyle’s commentary in the current (March 2012) issue of Birding magazine. Or, if you’d prefer, do it the old-fashioned way: Just whip out your copy of the March 2012 issue, turn to p. 56, and start reading.

I’m confident that it’s impossible that you won’t have at least some sort of reaction to something, somewhere, in Diana’s commentary. I mean, just the title of her commentary—“Good Birders Don’t Flash White iPhones: iEtiquette in the Field”—pushes half a dozen buttons I can think of!

Once again, click on this link to get to Diana’s commentary.

And then enter your comments below. Who knows—Maybe the ABA Code of Birding Ethics will be amended as a result of the discussion here at The ABA Blog. Or perhaps your local park or refuge will change its policy about the use of playback. And I can tell you this: I know for a fact that some of the app designers are paying attention.

Go for it! Enter your comments below, and together we just might impact the future of birding.

 

Gujarat, Take 2

 

In late November of 2010, I traveled to the Indian state of Gujarat for an event billed as the Global Bird Watchers’ Conference (GBWC). I had a great time at the GBWC, and I said as much in a post to The ABA Blog. Hundreds of folks attended the 2010 GBWC, and I counted it a privilege to make the acquaintance of dozens of them. One person who particularly impressed me was Uttej Rao, the impresario, for want of a better word, of the GBWC. Uttej is one of those people who accomplishes more in a week than most of us do during the course of a month. The GBWC was wonderful, as I’ve just said, and I assumed at the time that Uttej must have been very proud of what he had pulled off. I also assumed that Uttej probably wouldn’t leap at the next opportunity to cater to every whim and perceived need of some 500 birders all gathered together in the same place at the same time.

I was wrong.

The second Global Bird Watchers’ Conference (let’s call it GBWC–2) wrapped up late last month, Uttej Rao again served as de facto impresario of the Gujarat-based event, and I again was honored to attend as a delegate. As I was preparing for GBWC–2, I had an obvious question: How would the event differ from the inaugural event back in late 2010?

Well, the birding was a bit different. In 2010, I saw lots of Crab Plovers and Chestnut-bellied Sangrouse but no Pheasant-tailed Jacanas and Small Pratincoles; in 2012, my fortunes were precisely the opposite. In 2012, I dipped on Laggar Falcon, which I had seen in 2010; but in 2012 I saw several Steppe Eagles, which I had missed in 2010. On the whole, though, I would have to say that both GBWCs presented delegates with similarly wonderful birding experiences: plentiful Paddyfield Pipits and Clamorous Reed Warblers both times, gaudy Green Bee-eaters and Indian Rollers along every roadside, and Sarus Cranes and Painted Storks in gratifying plenitude. Gujarat’s state list—oh, yes, they do that in India too!—exceeds 500 species, and both GBWCs showcased the state’s diverse avifauna.

But what about the actual events themselves? Did they differ one from the other? Yes, I think so. And in an interesting and important way.

I sensed that GBWC–1 was focused primarily on getting Gujarat on birders’ radar screens. Mission accomplished. The delegates at that event were, by and large, what you and I would recognize as birders, and serious birders at that: folks with fancy optics and long life lists, folks with extensive knowledge of flight calls and primary formulae. I think I can honestly say that we birders were impressed by the Gujarati avifauna, and I hope we’ve succeeded in communicating to other birders that the state is well worth the visit. (Right: The Pied Kingfisher is one of more than 500 species documented to have occured in the Indian state of Gujarat. Photo by © Saleel Tambe–SaleelTambe.blogspot.com)

The delegates to GBWC–2, in contrast, were not, on the whole, what you and I would recognize as birders, at least not as serious birders. Instead, the delegates were drawn from a much wider pool of travel and tourism professionals. My take is that the vision of GBWC–2 was importantly expanded in scope and ambition. If GBWC–1 set out to make a case to birders, then GBWC–2’s objective was to demonstrate the viability of birding as a significant opportunity for the much broader tourism industry.

 

Here in North America, birding events are all the rage. Every North American state and province, it seems, puts on an annual field ornithologists’ convention. Myriad small towns—and some not-so-small cities—host birding festivals. Major birding symposia attract birders and vendors from all over. You get the picture.

What are some of the considerations that go into planning such events? In particular, what sorts of people do we give consideration to? I myself have been involved in the planning for a number of birding events, and I can tell you that all sorts of people enter into the equation: the evening speaker or speakers, of course; the workshop and field trip leaders; vendors, authors, and panelists for “stump the chumps”; the folks at the registration table; the all-important bus and van drivers; the emcee for the event; award recipients and other special guests. It just goes and on and on.

But what about the media? Speaking from my own experiences, I can say that media representatives—travel writers with the newspaper, for example, or television reporters—tend to be an afterthought. If they seek us out, great. But how often do we go looking for them? Speaking again from my own perspective, I can say that I’ve put a lot of time and energy over the years into procuring big-name keynote speakers, top-flight field trip leaders, and responsible registration-table volunteers; conversely, I haven’t gone overboard with phone calls and other inquiries to folks with the media. (Above: Various means of transportation were employed by delegates to GBWC-2010. Photo by © Alain Pascua–alainpascua.smugmug.com)

Why? Why is that? Is it because of the perception of little ROI, or “return on investment”? I mean, a famous keynote speaker practically guarantees high turnout; brilliant field trip leaders translate into high rates of customer satisfaction; and competent folks at the registration table make all the difference in the world. In all of those examples, the ROI is obvious: It pays, figuratively and even literally, to get good speakers, leaders, and volunteers.

But what’s the ROI for reaching out to the media? What’s the ROI for making overtures to writers and reporters with broad interests in travel and tourism?

I can think of two reasons for reaching out to the broader media.

The first reason is frankly mercenary. We birders could benefit from a little more—make that a lot more—mainstream media reportage. All things considered, it’s good to get exposure in newspapers and magazines, on television and the radio, etc. Media coverage of birding ought to translate into more public interest, better funding, and more resources for birding and for birders’ causes. True, a spot on the evening news probably isn’t going to cause a great bird to show up at the Podunk Prairie-Chicken Festival. But that coverage might well reap benefits—real, tangible benefits—a year or two down the line.

I said there were two reasons.

And the second reason, I have to say, is one that I’ve been slow to appreciate. Probably, I don’t yet fully appreciate its importance. But events like the 2012 Global Bird Watchers’ Conference are changing the way I think about birders and birding. In a nutshell, I’m coming to appreciate that there’s great value to be gotten from serious consideration of how everybody else relates to birding. Those non-birders and quasi-birders have perspective and insights that we birders lack. They have a grasp of issues and currents that we insiders often neglect. In certain key respects, they see the forest where we see only the trees.

 

Check out the following specimens of reportage from GBWC–2. The authors are not the sorts of folks who would ordinarily write for The ABA Blog or Birding magazine. Don’t be fooled by that. Don’t get freaked out by the lower-case bird names. (Um, they’re right and we’re wrong; I’ll blog about that some other day.) And don’t worry if some minor ornithological factoid was slightly misreported.

Instead, try to see the big picture—a messy, complex, and glorious canvas of bird communities and human communities all in the same place at the same time. I hope the following reports will help you achieve that vision. They and others like them have helped me to expand my vision, I can certainly say. They’ve helped me to gain a deeper appreciation for the insights and instincts of everybody else. (Right: Photo by © Alain Pascua–alainpascua.smugmug.com)

Here goes:

1. Irish travel writer Brendan Harding observes, “In this highly spiritual country there was no apparent conflict between man and his feathered counterpart. The land does not belong to one or the other, the land and its resources are simply, shared.” Click here to read Harding’s wonderful report in its entirety.

2. Paul Bernhardt, a Portuguese-based writer with Lonely Planet, emphasizes ecotourism in this report. “Gujarat is fast emerging as an eco-tourism hot spot,” Bernhardt notes, and “Avi (avian) tourism is a developing market and one that the conference organizers are keen to see mature.”

3. Coverage in the Times of India wasn’t quite as extensive as in Brendan Harding’s and Paul Bernhardt’s richly detailed blog posts, but we birders should be proud of any mention in the Times. That’s because the Times of India has the largest circulation of all English-language newspapers in the world. The Times ran at least three articles that I know of. I saw one in print while I was in Gujarat, and I can’t track it down online now. But here’s a nice overview of the event that's still online. And here’s an article focusing on a distressing conservation issue that came to light during GBWC–2.

4. For sure, the Global Bird Watchers’ Conference was, well, global in its perspective. Nevertheless, the American example of birdwatching was frequently adduced by conference delegates—and by those reporting on the event. In his article appearing in the Indian Express, Senior Correspondent Adam Halliday cites data from two of the paragons of American birding: Costa Rica and the United States.

5. As great as the birding was in Gujarat, the dancing arguably took center stage. You don’t have to believe me!—Check out Pamela Lin’s delightful report for the Digital Journal.

 

We Love The Jerk?

Peregrine Falcon strafing Snowy Owl, photo ©Rick Remington

"He’s a no good so and so, but she’ll never let him go / Though she knows it will never work, she loves the jerk / She loves the jerk."

 --John Hiatt, "She Loves The Jerk"

 

A friend of mine once observed that we often admire qualities in birds that we find irritating or even abhorrent in people. She was thinking in particular of the Great Kiskadee, a spectacular flycatcher whose garish dress and loudmouthedness she compared to a stereotypical used car salesman. Love it in the bird, hate it in the human. She was joking, of course. Mostly.

In a parallel but more serious vein, I was really struck by the juxtaposition of two blog posts yesterday about Snowy Owls and the trials they have faced this winter as so many have come south: Ted Eubanks' here on the ABA blog and Greg Neise's at the North American Birding Blog.

They're both great posts, well-crafted and thought-provoking, and I find myself largely in agreement with the sentiments expressed in both of them. But I can't help feeling there's a double standard at play so extreme that it demands some careful consideration. Not so much in the posts themselves, but in the responses they've gotten.

Greg's story of the Peregrine/Snowy encounter was greeted with comments like this:

"Awesome!"

"that was incredible, oh to have just one of these encounters, lucky ducks!"

"Whoa. Totally awesome to see. I'm glad they got photos to share with the rest of us. Wow, wow, wow!"

While the video of the owl being flushed that Ted links to inspires such disgust in cyberthrush that he suggests that, "... this guy should have a scarlet letter 'J' tatooed directly to his forehead," recalling both the extreme social ostracism of The Scarlet Letter as well as Brad Pitt's punishment for captured Nazis in Inglourious Basterds. And cyberthrush isn't alone in his outrage. The internet has been groaning with the cries of birders protesting the flushing of Snowies, as any recent reader of the New York Birding List can attest.

In short, when a birder/photographer harasses a Snowy Owl, oafishly flushing it once, we're ready to light the torches and grab the pitch forks. But when a Peregrine Falcon mercilessly strafes a Snowy Owl again and again for five minutes, "...we [are] happy just to witness one of nature's greatest gifts."

I'm not suggesting that one set of these reactions is wrong and the other right. But the differences sure are striking. 

Of course, I get it. It feels vastly different seeing a human clumsily and needlessly flush a bird versus watching a Peregrine use its consummate aeronautic skills to force one to throw its talons in the the air in self-defense again and again, even if the latter is surely far, far, far more stressful for the owl involved. If I myself were present at the events videotaped at Boundary Bay and photographed at the Chicago Lakefront, I'd certainly have been indignant at the former and exhilirated by the latter. My question is, why? And what, if anything, should we do about it?

I would say up front that I find the oft-expressed view that one is, "natural," and the other is not to be deeply unsatisfying.

But I am also more than willing to concede that our capacity for ethics places somewhat different obligations on us than on our fellow species. We won't get far with an ABA Code of Ethics for Peregrines. And yet I think that document is one of the ABA's most important contributions for birders.

And what human can say that Peregrines don't have Peregrine ethics? Ethics which may demand that they test the mettle of a potential rival and/or prey item?

And an ethical sense isn't the only difference, of course. If Homo sapiens had just been removed from the Endangered Species list, having been put in jeopardy by the activities of several billion Falco peregrinus, well, that would be a different world from the one in which we all live.

So I'm offering it up for discussion. Take a look at Greg's post and at Ted's post. Watch the YouTube video. Why does one owl incident make us shake with joyous excitement and another with rage?

And when you do encounter situations that call for action, such as birders or others behaving badly, I certainly encourage you to address them, confidently and, one hopes, effectively. But I encourage you to do so with a certain measure of understanding, even empathy. This planet is a hard place for all the life that inhabits it. That would be so with or without human beings. We've all been jerks at times and we've all flown with the angels at others. Let's help each other spend more and more time aloft.

eBird Changed My Life

 

eBird project leader Brian L. Sullivan likes to say that eBird has changed the way he birds. He said so in his essay “eBird and the Evolution of a Birder,” appearing in the January/February 2008 issue of Birding, and he said it again in “A Birding Interview—with Brian L. Sullivan,” which appears in the September/October 2011 Birding.

Me too.

eBird has changed the way I bird.

But I’m going to do Brian one better. I’m here to say that eBird has changed my life.

First things first. In case you’ve been living in a cave for the past five years, eBird is a web-based birding checklist run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Electronic checklist software has been around for decades, but eBird differs from its predecessors in a fundamental regard: eBird serves the entire community of birders, all at the same time. When you enter an eBird checklist, it doesn’t just go into your proverbial e-shoebox. Instead, your checklist instantly becomes part of a global network of literally millions of checklists.

eBird is revolutionizing the way we bird.

 

After a couple of false starts, I became an eBirder for good on New Year’s Day of 2007. Starting that day and continuing now through New Year’s Eve on 2011, I have entered 3,066 eBird checklists. That comes out to 1.68 checklists per day during that five-year period. That’s cool, but the following is a lot cooler: I have entered at least one eBird checklist every single day since I became an eBirder. That is to say, I have gone birding every day for the past 1,826 days.

The last time I did something like that was during a five-year period running from the beginning of eighth grade through the end of the summer after my senior year in high school. Thanks to eBird, I bird again with the same tireless zeal with which I applied myself in my earliest years as a birder.

But there are some big differences.

 

I make it a point to enter into eBird my observations of subspecies, hybrids, slash/combos, “spuhs,” and uncountable exotics. My eBird checklists from Boulder County, Colorado, routinely include such entries as Cassiar Junco, Lazigo Bunting, Cackling/Canada Goose, Empidonax sp., and Mandarin Duck. Back in grade school, I would have declined to record some of that stuff. (Right: Cassiar Junco by © Bill Schmoker.)

I almost always enter exact or estimated counts of species I record on my eBird checklists. In grade school, I was often content merely to note just general abundance (“lots,” “some,” “present,” etc.). These days, though, I take the time to count every Killdeer, every Song Sparrow, and every Ring-billed Gull—as a result of which I have stumbled upon such goodies in my home state of Colorado as Ruff, Nelson’s Sparrow, and Black-legged Kittiwake, respectively. If I hadn’t been eBirding, I probably wouldn’t have found those goodies.

I have never, ever, entered an incomplete eBird checklist. All 3,066 of my eBird checklists have included all the birds was I able to identify during the period of observation. Doing these things has made me a better birder, for what that’s worth. And doing so has made be a better and more disciplined observer of the world around me—and that’s worth a great deal.

As an eBirder, I have adopted new modes of thinking. Thanks to eBird, I have embraced new conceptions of the world around me. Being an eBirder has led me to question received wisdom about such matters as wilderness, nativeness, determinacy, truth, and beauty. eBird has opened my mind to a material universe that is bigger, more brilliant, and more glorious than I had known.

 

On the other side of the coin, eBird has also contributed to my newfound appreciation for the immense value of the little things in life.

A few weeks ago, I was wrapping up a long and complicated day—a day of appointments, deadlines, phone calls, and no birding. Night had fallen, and my son and I were racing—literally, running—from one bus stop to another. Then a thought occurred to me: Oh. OH! I haven’t eBirded today!

 “Slow down!” I pleaded. “Stop!”

My son and I detoured from the sidewalk, scooted down a very short footpath that led under a bridge, and wound up on the bank of a creek that flows through downtown Boulder. We couldn’t have been more than fifty feet from the sidewalk, but we might as well have been a million miles away. We looked for Rock Pigeons roosting on the concrete supports of the bridge. We saw no Rock Pigeons. We wondered if we might spook an American Dipper. We didn’t see a dipper. Maybe we would come upon the local flock of wintering Mallards and American Wigeons? Nope. No dice.

My eBird checklist for that date was zero birds, zero species, zero individuals. We had “nothing” to show for our effort, but the experience was priceless. An otherwise entirely forgettable day has been immortalized in my memory. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the water flowing under the ice. I remember the smell and feel of the cold winter air that night. And I’ll never forget the experience of just being there, as time seemed to stop for a glorious moment.

 

I often get asked the question, “What got you interested in birds?” And I sometimes get the more general version of that question, namely, “What sorts of people get interested in birds?”

Here now is a variant on that question: “What sorts of people really get into eBird?” Or, to make it more personal: “Why should you get into eBird?” Are you into listing? Are you a proponent of “citizen science”? Do you want to be a better birder? Those are all fine reasons for getting into eBird. Indeed, those things attracted me to eBird in the first place.

What sustains me, though, as an eBirder is something entirely different. I keep at it, quite simply and quite profoundly, because eBird keeps me going, because eBird sustains me.

I’ve got a lot to do today—deadlines for the March 2012 issue of Birding, thank-you cards that need to be written, mail that needs to be opened... And I suppose I should feed the cat. But that can all wait. I need to get outside, I have to get outside, right now, so that I can enter an eBird checklist for this last afternoon of 2011.

Go on! Try it. Click here.

eBird will change your life.

 

Stealth Birds

 

One of my earliest memories of the fourth edition of the Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds has to do with something that appears on p. 29. Half way down the page, Peterson writes:

“Allan Phillips argued convincingly in American Birds that practically all of the Semipalmated Sandpipers so freely reported in winter on the southern coasts of the U.S. were really Western Sandpipers.”

When I first saw those words, I had never seen a Semi, a Western, or any other species of sandpiper. I had no basis for evaluating Phillips’ claim. But I was intrigued by the possibility that everybody—save Phillips—had gotten it wrong.

The wisdom of Allan Phillips provided me with early instruction in one of life’s great lessons: Perception and reality are quite often out of kilter.

Fast forward to my college years. One of the great new bird books from that era was Kenn Kaufman’s Advanced Birding. I loved that book (and I still do), and I was particularly fascinated by something on p. 30:

“Most birders were not even aware of the existence of two forms [Western Grebe, Clark’s Grebe] until the early 1980s—shortly before the two were formally split in 1985.”

That passage hit me where it hurts, I have to say. That’s because I had recently had my first encounter with those striking, swan-necked, black-and-white grebes. I had watched the birds carefully, closely, for an extended period of time. And yet I honestly couldn’t say whether they had been Clark’s, Westerns, or both. In hindsight, I know that the two species are readily separated from one another. At the time, though, they were strangely indeterminate for me, one and the same in my mind’s eye. The birds “weren’t in the book,” so I was unaware of the differences.

There are many other stories like the preceding.

Joseph Tobias, writing in the July/August 2007 issue of Birding, tells the strange tale of the recent “discovery” in Peru of the Rufous Twistwing. The species had been seen by hundreds of birders and field ornithologists. But it wasn’t in the book, so they all assumed it was something else—some other species, properly pictured in the book.

Alvaro Jaramillo, in his “Tales from the Cryptic Species” in the May/June 2006 Birding, puts a chiefly North American spin on the story. Were you birding a generation ago? If so, you probably weren’t aware of the Gunnison Sage-Grouse. Nobody was. It wasn’t in the book; it hadn’t been a named to science. What we now refer to as Centrocercus minimus was just the “Sage Grouse” to the hundreds of birders who had seen it; and it was called the “sage hen” by the thousands of hunters who had shot at it.

These and other stories fascinate me. They point to one of the great currents in modern human history: our ongoing discovery of a universe that is weirder and more wonderful than we’d ever imagined. Everybody knows the famous players in this unfolding drama: Nikolai Copernicus, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and their ilk. And we birders have our own pantheon of heroes: Allan Phillips, of Western Sandpiper fame; Dan Lane, discoverer of the Rufous Twistwing; Clait Braun and Jessica Young, who realized there was something special, something unique, about the “Sage Grouse” of the Gunnison Basin; and others—folks inclined to think outside the box, to challenge the conventional wisdom, to embrace new conceptions of reality.

 

Which brings me now to the matter of an intriguing article in the recently published November 2011 issue of Birding. The author is Tony White. The title is suggestive: “The False Kirtland’s: A Cautionary Tale.” Ah. It’s always valuable to remind overzealous twitchers that a Magnolia Warbler in fall might be mistaken for a Kirtland’s Warbler. That must be the take-home message from “The False Kirtland’s,” right?

Guess again. Evidently, many birders have gotten the Kirtland’s Warbler mixed up not with the Magnolia Warbler, but, rather, with an entirely different warbler species. And what might that other warbler species be? Well, I’m not going to tell you quite yet.

Instead, check out this photo, from p. 35 of the November 2011 Birding, of a Kirtland’s Warbler:

 

 

 

 

It all pans out. Bluish above with white wing bars, yellow below with black streaking along the flanks; black lores; and, of course, those telltale white eye-arcs. Kirtland’s. Check.

Now what about this photo, from p. 37 of the November Birding: 

 

 

 

 

This warbler is bluish above with white wing bars, it’s yellow below with black streaking along the flanks, and it’s got black lores and white eye-arcs. Also a Kirtland’s?

To be sure, it doesn’t look quite right. I mean, that honking big bill, for starters. But let’s be honest with ourselves. If you’ve made it this far, you’re on heightened alert for a “trick question,” if you will. You’ve probably sensed I’m up to no good.

Now pretend for a moment that you have not been following along with me. Instead, it’s 1975, and you’re birding the Bahamas in winter. You’re looking for the critically endangered Kirtland’s Warbler, which winters only on Abaco and Grand Bahama. You’ve done your homework: blue above, white wing bars; yellow below, black flank streaking; black lores and white eye-arcs. Naturally, you want—more than that, you need!—Kirtland’s Warbler. You’re in a Kirtland’s Warbler frame of mind. You’ve just encountered a bird like the one pictured on p. 37 of the November Birding. For sure, it’s not a Magnolia or any other potential Kirtland’s lookalike pictured in your field guide.

All true. You see, your bird is a Bahama Warbler. A Ba-what Warbler? Yes, a Bahama Warbler. The Bahama Warbler was until a few months ago “just” a subspecies—albeit a highly distinctive one—of the Yellow-throated Warbler. Now that it’s its own species, we’ll doubtless be hearing more about the Bahama Warbler. But birders in the late 20th century had practically no information about this distinctive resident of the pine forests of the Bahamas. The bird “wasn’t in the book.” So those birders did what you and I and practically any other birder would do: They put it in the best-fitting box, which happened to be Kirtland’s Warbler.

On a personal note, what’s cool—what’s really cool—to me about this story is that I had no idea. Until Tony White submitted his article, I had no idea that one might misidentify a Bahama Warbler as a Kirtland’s Warbler. To be honest with you, I hadn’t even heard of the Bahama Warbler until relatively recently. If I’d been birding the Bahamas in the late 20th century, I bet I’d have made the same mistake as all those other birders. Reading “The False Kirtland’s” has made me a better birder, I suppose. But there’s something else, something more valuable than that: Tony White’s article has made me a bit more aware of the world around me.

We publish articles at Birding based on a variety of criteria. Elsewhere, you may recall, I’ve written about the importance of authorial voice as a guiding principle for us at Birding. Another essential criterion can be expressed in the form of a question: “Did I learn something new from this article?” My hope is that every article in Birding will provide you with at least a kernel or nugget of new information about birds. And every once in a while, we’ll run an article, I hope, that causes us to reexamine old notions and assumptions about the way things are in this fascinating world of ours, ever more wonderful when we engage it with our minds wide open.

 

Darwin, Schoenberg, and Sibley: A New Dawn for Nature Study?

 

Pete Dunne, in his wonderfully didactic Essential Field Guide Companion, classifies the Brown-headed and Pygmy nuthatches as the “pack nuthatches.” I like it! For starters, I like how “pack nuthatch” conveys—shall we say?—essential information about the flocking behavior of these peripatetic pixies of the pinewoods. I also like how “pack nuthatch” hints at something about nuthatch evolution; I like how the name implies that the Brown-headed and Pygmy nuthatches are each other’s closest relatives. They’re the only “pack nuthatches.” Other nuthatches, in Dunne’s formulation, get other monikers.

It is plausible, I hope you will agree with me, that the Brown-headed and Pygmy nuthatches are what ornithologists refer to as “sister species.” That means they evolved from a shared, or “common,” ancestor—one not shared by any other extant bird species. If ornithologists had been around to classify that common ancestor, they would have given it a name. Maybe they would have called that bird—why not?—the capital-P Pack Nuthatch.

Today, of course, the Brown-headed and Pygmy nuthatches are classified as two separate species. Many thousands of years ago, in the scenario outlined in the previous paragraph, they—or, more properly, their ancestors—were one single species. The process of going from one species to two species was gradual. It’s not as if the Pack Nuthatch suddenly split into the Brown-headed and Pygmy nuthatches at say, 9:00 a.m. G.M.T. on Tuesday, October 23rd, 4004 B.C. Rather, there was some period—lasting perhaps hundreds or thousands of years—during which the (properly hyphenated, lower-case) pack-nuthatches were neither one species nor two species. (Left: Pygmy Nuthatch by © Bill Schmoker.)

I think most of us will have had no problem with the preceding. We understand that “speciation”—the process by which species come into existence—usually requires a long time and tends to be gradual. We understand that you don’t just flip a switch at some point in geological time, and declare that species A has instantaneously been transformed into species A' and A''.

Or do we? Do we really accept that that’s how evolution works?

Consider now the example of the eastern and western populations of the Red-shouldered Hawk. It’s certainly plausible that these two populations arose from a common ancestor, some undifferentiated (“monotypic”) Red-shouldered Hawk. But their breeding populations are completely isolated at the present time; and with continued isolation of their breeding populations, they might well evolve into two separate species. Gazing into our crystal ball, we’ll say that, thousands of years from now, those two separate species will have been christened the Swamp Buzzard and the California Buzzard, respectively. (Right: California Red-Shouldered Hawk by © Bill Schmoker.)

That’s all well and good. A single species, the Red-shouldered Hawk, thousands of years ago. And two species, the Swamp and California buzzards, at some point thousands of years in the future.

But what about right now, in the second decade of the 21st century? Are these birds still one species? Or have they already become two species?

Or are they neither one species nor two species?

Think back to Pete Dunne’s “pack nuthatches.” At some point in their evolutionary past, we all agree, those nuthatches were neither one species nor two. Rather, they were in transit, if you will, from being one species to being two species. They were in the process of speciation.

Speciation is an ongoing process. It happened eons ago, and it’s still happening today.

And that brings me to what I consider to be one of the great ironies of modern thought. Many of us snigger at Creationists for imagining that all species came into being, perfectly formed, in an instant, at some point in the not-so-distant past. And yet many of us—we non-Creationists—do the exact same thing in our view of “species” at the present time. We demand that a population of organisms be this species, or that species, or these two species, or those two species, or three species, or four species... Like the Creationists, we cherish the idea of the fixity of species. The Creationists say that species were fixed at the moment of Creation. We say they’re fixed right now.

We say that the Red-shouldered Hawk is either one tick on our checklists or two ticks on our checklists. Conversely, we reject that the Red-shouldered Hawk could be both one tick and two ticks at the exact same time. And yet every credible analysis of “Darwin’s dangerous idea” demands that very interpretation.

Speaking of Darwin...

 

Toward the beginning of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin launches an attack on the proposition that it is meaningful to say that a population of organisms is or isn’t such-and-such a species. In Chapter 2 (“Variation Under Nature”) of Origin, Darwin writes:

“It must be admitted that many forms, considered by highly competent judges as varieties, have so perfectly the character of species that they are ranked by other highly competent judges as good and true species. But to discuss whether they are rightly called species or varieties, before any definition of these terms has been generally accepted, is vainly to beat the air.”

Then a full-on shot across the bow of ancient thinking about species:

“Certainly no clear line of demarcation has as yet been drawn between species and subspecies—that is, the forms which in the opinion of some naturalists come very near to, but do not quite arrive at the rank of species; or, again, between subspecies and well-marked varieties, or between lesser varieties and individual differences. These differences blend into each other in an insensible series; and a series impresses the mind with the idea of an actual passage.”

And a few paragraphs down:

“From these remarks it will be seen that I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms.”

From this point forward in Origin, Darwin sets about the task of dismantling the old idea of the fixity of species. In chapter after chapter, Darwin adduces example upon example of the fluidity of evolution by means of natural selection. Darwin’s Victorian prose can be a bit of a slog for the modern reader, increasingly accustomed to the conveyance of every idea via the medium of the 140-character “tweet.” But those subsequent chapters are worth the slog: Darwin marshals massive evidence in support of the view that evolution has been happening for very long periods of time, and, furthermore, that evolution is still happening.

And then we come to the final chapter of On the Origin of Species. Chapter 14 (“Recapitulation and Conclusion”) is a tour de force, one of the greatest scientific treatises of all time. Darwin seems to give it his all in Chapter 14. And in Chapter 14, Darwin unleashes his final, devastating assault on the idea that populations of organisms must be attributed to this species or that species.

“No one can draw any clear distinction between individual differences and slight varieties,” he writes, “or between more plainly marked varieties and subspecies, and species.”

And this:

“On the view that species are only strongly marked and permanent varieties, and that each species first existed as a variety, we can see why it is that no line of demarcation can be drawn between species, commonly supposed to have been produced by special acts of creation, and varieties which are acknowledged to have been produced by secondary laws.”

Then he really piles it on:

“When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history. Systematists will be able to pursue their labors as at present; but they will not be incessantly haunted by the shadowy doubt whether this or that form be in essence a species.”

For many people, Darwin lets on, “This may not be a cheering prospect.”

True enough, “But we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species,” Darwin concludes.

All of which brings me around now to the matter of the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg.

 

If you could stick with me through this next section, I would be most grateful. I accept that it might seem odd that I’m dragging in a composer who was born more than 100 years ago. But I’m going somewhere with this, honest. And, before too long, I’ll be talking about The Sibley Guide. We’ll be back on familiar ground soon enough.

Arnold Schoenberg is perhaps the most notorious “classical music” composer of all time. His scandalous “achievement” was to discard what had generally come to be regarded as Western tonality—a way of making music that characterizes the oeuvres of everyone from Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn to Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson.

If you look at a sheet of music—whether it’s “Let It Be” or “Der Erlkönig”—the very first thing you’ll see is some indication as to key signature. This key signature is a system for ordering the relationships among the various notes within a particular work of music. In conventional, or “classical,” Western tonality, a piece of music has to be in a certain key. McCartney’s “Let It Be” is in the key of C major, for example, and Schubert’s “Der Erlkönig” is in the key of E minor. It wouldn’t make sense, according to Western tonality, to say that a piece were simultaneously in C major and E minor. Even weirder would be to say that a piece weren’t in any key at all.

Enter Arnold Schoenberg. Like many composers of his generation, he pushed the limits of conventional tonality. In doing so, Schoenberg and his contemporaries were heeding the timeless artistic impulse to push the limits of form and style. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, that great paragon of classical music, delighted in the expression of such impulses. His “Dissonance” Quartet starts out in a manner so as to obscure the key signature of the work; but after a short tease, the work gallops off in that most conventional of key signatures, C major.

Schoenberg, however, took it a step further. A big step further. When it comes to pushing the limits of Western tonality, Arnold Schoenberg was the Neil Armstrong of composers. In the last movement of the second string quartet, composed in 1908, Schoenberg took the giant leap of composing music with no key signature at all.

It would be an understatement to say that Schoenberg’s atonal music was controversial. Indeed, Schoenberg’s music was—and still is—widely hated. Why? Why is that?

Well, one reason—and it’s a big reason—has to do with personal taste. To be blunt about it, many people just don’t like the sound of Schoenberg’s atonal music. That’s fine. Some people don’t like the sound of Mozart. Some people don’t like the sound of McCartney. Some people don’t like the sound of John Coltrane. Some people don’t like the sound of Ravi Shankar. That’s all well and good. It’s personal preference—no more, no less—and I ain’t goin’ there.

But there’s another reason, and this one is going to bring us back to the matter of “pack nuthatches” and Red-shouldered Hawks. The other reason is that Schoenberg’s music—even to a great many folks who have never heard it!—represents something sinister. The objection to Schoenberg is more ideological than aesthetic. In this view, the music of Schoenberg is destructive and degenerate. According to this view, Schoenberg took something wonderful—the great “classical” tradition of Mozart, Schubert, and others—and degraded it. The old way was ordered and beautiful; the new way was chaotic and ugly.

Enter The Sibley Guide.

 

In my opinion, The Sibley Guide is the greatest field guide ever.

I think a lot of people would agree with that assessment of mine. From time to time, though, I do hear a particular gripe about The Sibley Guide. As critics note, The Sibley Guide, in its very extensive treatment of geographic variation in birds, abandons the age-old practice of assigning “trinomials” to regionally distinct populations. Other guides refer to the occidentalis and wymani subspecies of the Western Gull, but David Sibley simply calls them “northern” and “southern.” Willow Flycatchers get a whole bunch of names (adastus, brewsteri, campestris, extimus, traillii...) in other guides, but they’re simply “western” and “eastern” in The Sibley Guide. And in Sibley’s account of the Dark-eyed Junco, even though it shows thirty-one individuals spread across three large pages, there is nowhere to be found mention of a trinomial.

I’ll come right out and say that, unlike many of my birding friends, I strongly applaud Sibley’s decision to forego the use of trinomials.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First things first. Why? Why did Sibley do that? Why are trinomial names absent from The Sibley Guide?

Well, a great start would be to read Sibley’s own words. Check out his essay, “In Defense of Listing, and Subspecies, but Not Listing Subspecies,” which appeared in the February 2004 issue of Birding.

In the meantime, here are three thoughts of my own:

1. I favor Sibley’s decision because it promotes knowledge of and understanding about what we really see in nature. I think it’s realistic for experienced observers to distinguish between generalized and somewhat fuzzy groupings of “western” vs. “eastern” Willow Flycatchers. Many—although certainly not all—of these birds can be said to possess a suite of traits that correspond to one regional grouping or the other.

2. Conversely, when we start to get into campestris Willow Flycatchers vs. traillii Willow Flycatchers, we’re courting disaster. Well, that’s a bit strong. But I think we can certainly say that we’re flirting with fantasy. According to part 1 of Peter Pyle’s magisterial Identification Guide, any differences between campestris and traillii may, in fact, be fantasy. They may simply be two different names (“synonymns”) for the same population. (Right: Willow Flycatcher by © Bill Schmoker.)

3. So why all the grousing about no trinomials in The Sibley Guide? I think it’s because The Sibley Guide is analogous, in some sense, to Arnold Schoenberg’s second string quartet. Just as many people would say that a work of music has to have a key signature, so many people believe that a bird population has to be attributable to a certain taxon.

I need to be crystal clear about something. I am not saying that birders want every single bird to be attributable to one taxon or another. We all know about Thayer’s Gulls. We know that not every individual candidate Thayer’s Gull can be definitively called by that name. That’s not what I’m talking about. Rather, I’m talking about the entire population. I believe that many birders believe that the Thayer’s Gull ought to be either its own species or “just” a subspecies. But that’s missing the point, I believe. The fundamental debate, as I see it, is not whether the Thayer’s Gull is or isn’t a full species. Rather, the debate is about something deeper than that.

Think back now to the example of the Red-shouldered Hawk. The question is not whether the California population is a full species (I called it the “California Buzzard”) or “just” a subspecies of the Red-shouldered Hawk. No, the fundamental question, as I see it, is whether the Red-shouldered Hawk has to be either one species or two species (or more). I don’t think it has to be one or two. I believe that that view of mine comes from a faithful reading of On the Origin of Species. And I believe that that view is an exciting—and, ultimately, deeply liberating—consequence of what I consider to be one of the most useful and revolutionary features of The Sibley Guide.

 

We’ve arrived now, if provisionally and tenuously so, at a new sort of avian taxonomy—one without names. To be sure, it’s just a start. The Sibley Guide, of course, makes use of scientific names, or “Latin binomials,” for those taxa which enjoy full-species rank. Even though Sibley discards elegans as the trinomial for the California population of the Red-shouldered Hawk, he most assuredly does employ Buteo lineatus for the species as a whole.

So it’s just a start.

And, truth be told, Schoenberg’s second string quartet was just a start. Only the last movement of the work is atonal. And even that last movement ends on a major-key tonal chord. But he’d let the genie out of the bottle. There was no stopping what was to come—the full-on atonality of what has come to be known as twelve-tone serialism.

Now hang on a second! As I noted earlier, lots of people hate Schoenberg’s music and legacy. And in some sense, Schoenberg has to be rated a failure. Although there are certainly exceptions, most “classical” composers have not followed in Schoenberg’s footsteps. Most of the “classical” music of the 20th century is not atonal. Meanwhile, there are all the other musicians who are generally said to work outside the “classical” milieu: Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, and many others. Their diverse music-making has proceeded largely without reference to the legacy of Schoenberg.

Aren’t we likewise entitled to ignore, perhaps even to hate, this new avian taxonomy—this abomination without names?

Not so fast.

Musical preferences are, in the first and final analysis, all about personal taste. I have a friend who professes to love the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. (Google him.) I think that’s weird of my friend, but I wouldn’t say she’s wrong (or right) for enjoying Stockhausen’s Gruppen.

It’s different, though, with science. If someone were to profess that the world is flat, I would say that that person is wrong. Same thing with a profession that the Earth is at the center of our solar system. That’s not mere personal preference. Rather, that’s a matter of reality. I suppose there are those who would like for the world to be flat. And we all know that there were many persons who wanted the Earth to be at the center of our solar system. They felt so strongly about it that they executed someone—his name was Giordano Bruno—who disagreed with them. But that action, as drastic as it was, had no bearing—none whatsoever—on whether or not the Earth is at the center of our solar system.

So it is with “belief” in evolution.

No, I’m not about to bark up that tree. I’m not going to touch the evolution vs. Creation debate.

Rather, I’m going to address the following remarks solely and squarely at those who profess to, ahem, “believe” in evolution.

 

Just about the most brilliant insight of Charles Darwin is inarguably his least appreciated insight. Darwin clearly understood that evolution operates not at the level of groups or populations but rather at the level of individual organisms. Yes, evolution influences the traits that distinguish one population from another. But, again, evolution operates at the level of the individual.

It took fully a century for that great insight to be firmly and finally accepted by the scientific establishment. And the idea wouldn’t be transmitted to the general public until the publication in 1976 of Richard Dawkins’ dazzling and incendiary manifesto, The Selfish Gene.

Why? Why was there such resistance to the insight that evolution operates not on groups, but rather on individuals, or even their individual genes?

Darwin hints at an answer in this tease from that ominous Chapter 2 of Origin:

“Hence I look at individual differences, though of small interest to the systematist, as of high importance for us, as being the first step towards such slight varieties as are barely thought worth recording in works on natural history.”

Darwin isn’t just going up against those folks whom today we know as Creationists. Darwin is also going up against a powerfully entrenched scientific tradition of biological systematics.

Ever since Adam, we’ve been true believers—believers, that is to say, in the concept of the species. I’m not talking about this particular species concept or that particular concept, but rather in the more general notion that the species itself is somehow real. The idea of the species resonated perfectly with Plato’s vision of order and beauty in the universe. And the idea was eventually beatified in the scientific canon by that arch-Platonist, Carl von Linné—Latinized (of course!) to the more familiar Linnaeus.

Don’t get me wrong. I totally accept that the species concept is a useful way of organizing information about the world around us. But that doesn’t mean it’s right. That doesn’t mean it’s true. In this regard, I note that it’s useful, to be sure, to think in terms of sunrise, sunset, and the arc of the day—terms which constantly reinforce the impression that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Unquestionably, we think, as Isaac Newton did, in terms of “absolute” space and time. Yet we also know, thanks to Albert Einstein, that the distance between two objects depends on an observer’s position and velocity.

Aristotle’s geocentric solar system and Newton’s absolute space and time are, in some sense, alive and well. We live our daily lives according to Aristotelian and Newtonian precepts. We set our clocks according to events that play out on the Earth, not on the Sun. We operate motor vehicles, build bridges, and send rockets into space according to the principles of “classical,” or pre-Einsteinian, mechanics.

But we’re living a lie, so to speak.

We know that Aristotle and Newton—as brilliant as they were, and as useful as they still are—erected systems that are not, in an objective sense, true.

Shouldn’t we hold the Adam–Plato–Linnaeus concept of the species to the same standard?

 

The other day, my kids and I went sledding near our home in Boulder County, Colorado. We were having a grand old time, but the Sun was slipping under the western horizon (as per Aristotle!), and it was time to head home. As we trudged back through the new-fallen snow, we passed a big flock of birds roosting along the shore of Waneka Lake.

Naturally, we wondered what they were.

Not all that long ago, we would have shrugged them off as Canada Geese.

Then came the American Ornithologists’ Union, which in 2004 “split” the Canada Goose into two species—one called the Cackling Goose, the other retaining the old name of Canada Goose. Immediately, there was speculation, still ongoing—still downright rampant, I would say—that the “white-cheeked goose” complex might consist of yet additional species.

Let’s not worry about that right now. Let’s return to Waneka Lake.

What were those birds?

Well, there were big ones and small ones. There were medium ones. Some had long necks, others had short necks. Some had dusky-gray breasts, others had nearly white breasts, and a few had sandy-brown breasts. A few had bright white bands across the breast, but most did not. Some had short, stubby bills; others had long, sloping bills. Many of them said hink, but some of them said honk.

It was like something out of Dr. Seuss.

Well? What were they? The really big ones were perhaps moffitti Canada Geese. The really small ones were probably nominate hutchinsii Cackling Geese. The medium ones may have been mainly parvipes Canada Geese, but who knows?—big Cackling Geese and small Canada Geese overlap in morphology, plumage, and everything else. Which brings us to the bugaboo of the taverneri group of intermediate “white-cheeked geese,” doubtless present in small numbers—and maybe present in substantial numbers—in Colorado in the winter. Nobody knows. Nobody knows what taverneri is—or what they are. One subspecies? Two? Three? Are they Canada Geese? Or are they Cackling Geese?

(An aside to my birding pals who are way into the evolution and identification of “white-cheeked geese”: Why, I haven’t even touched the problem of paraphyly vis-à-vis the Barnacle Goose of Europe and the Nēnē of Hawaii!)

Dr. Seuss would have loved this.

Our decision out there at Waneka Lake was to enjoy the geese one bird at a time. Over there, the big one with a sandy-brown breast emblazoned with a white band. Right here, the medium one with a stubby bill but a relatively long neck. Out there in the water, the small one with the unmarked dusky-gray breast. Another medium one, this one with a shorter neck but an undeniably long bill. That group over there, of variably sized birds but mainly with white bands across their breasts. Those two big ones standing together, the ones with the pale breasts. Oh. They’re calling now. One of them is higher-pitched than the other. And here comes another medium one, this one with a stubby bill but a long, thin neck. (Right: Geese by © Bill Schmoker.)

The experience of studying those geese, one bird at a time, was exhilarating. And it was, as I hinted earlier, liberating. It is exhilarating and liberating to engage life on earth as it really is.

I accept that folks of my generation will continue to debate species concepts and species limits for as long as we’re alive. But I wonder about my kids. What about them? Will their generation finally throw off the shackles of Platonic thinking about the concept of the species? It is exhilarating and liberating to think that maybe, just maybe, they will do so.

 

The ABA, Wikipedia, and You

 

Google the word “birding” and one of the very first hits will surely be the Wikipedia entry for our passion and pastime. See for yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birding

The entry runs to 4,982 words, according to my computer, covering such topics as “The history of birdwatching,” “Competition,” “Code of conduct,” and “Famous birdwatchers.” And this: “Networking and organization.”

The entry for “Networking and organization” is a mere 95 words long. It has links to five “prominent national and continental organizations,” three of them based in Britain, two of them from the United States. One of the American entries is the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the other is our very own American Birding Association. (Note to old school grammarians: I’m certain that that comma is superior to a semicolon or coordinating conjunction.)

So I clicked on the link to “American Birding Association,” and I got to a 239-word entry on the ABA. Topics covered: the ABA’s move toward a more inclusive conception of its membership; the ABA’s Code of Birding Ethics; and the ABA’s multi-authored blog, that is to say, the forum in which I’m writing right now. As many of us know, The ABA Blog recently celebrated its first birthday, which means that this particular Wikipedia entry has been updated within the past year. I’ll say more about that later.

Oh. One other item caught my eye: “The ABA publishes Birding, its bimonthly magazine.” I clicked on the link to “Birding,” and that took me to a 664-word entry on our bimonthly members’ magazine.

More than half the total verbiage (345 words, or 52%) was devoted to a single topic. Care to guess what that topic was? Perhaps bird identification? Maybe bird finding? Listing? Binoculars?

Nope. None of those. Rather, “Demographics of birders.”

Like you, I’m surprised.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m delighted by the coverage. And the topic is more timely than ever. Recently, the ABA—represented by President Jeff Gordon and board member Kenn Kaufman—participated in an important symposium on Changing the Face of American Birding.

I’m way into the sociology of birding. And I suppose that interest—some might say that bias—of mine might conceivably influence content in Birding. But not too much, I hope. I’m wary, to say the least, of editors with agendas. I hope I got that point across in a commentary beginning on p. 56 of the November 2010 issue of Birding.

Wait. I do have an agenda, come to think of it, an overarching agenda, a “prime directive,” if you will. It is this: to give voice, on the pages of Birding, to the diverse voices and aspirations of the birding community in North America and beyond. (Sound familiar? I said as much, in a post back in March to The ABA Blog.)

Simply put, there’s more to Birding than articles on “Demographics of birders.” In other words, this Wikipedia entry is out of balance.

It’s also out of date. In the first paragraph of the entry, content of the magazine is described “as of 2007.” In this internet era, four years is a long time. The entry for Birding magazine is badly in need of an update.

And, honestly, most of the rest of the Wikipedia coverage of the ABA and its programs would benefit from a makeover.

Before I go any further, I want to be very clear about something: I intend no criticism, none whatsoever, of the folks who have contributed to the Wikipedia entries for Birding magazine and other offerings of the ABA. Indeed, I am highly grateful for the exposure.

But we need more of it! The Wikipedia entries for the ABA and its programs need to be updated, expanded, and rebalanced.

And that’s where YOU come in. Anybody can contribute content to Wikipedia. It’s a piece of cake. Start off by going to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Birding_Association

Then click on “Edit,” up toward the upper right.

Then fire away!

It’s that easy. It really is.

Now you might be saying, “Gee, Ted, why don’t you do it?” Or “Maybe David Hartley, the ABA’s Director of Communications, could do it”? Or perhaps President Jeff Gordon or blogmeister Nate Swick?

True, any one of the four of us could do it. So could anybody else on the staff at the ABA.

But there’s that old problem of bias. Check out Wikipedia entries for “Occupy Wall Street” and “Tea Party Protests,” for example, and you’ll see red flags—actually, they’re yellow and orange, respectively—up front. The best Wikipedia entries are those that benefit from the broad contributions of interested, intelligent, and neutral e-citizens. 

Yes, I’m talking about YOU.

What are you waiting for? Go on! Do it! You can put in as much or as little work as you like. Add a factoid; fix a bad URL; or rework a sentence that doesn’t quite get the point across. Or write brand-new content. For starters, the entry on Birding magazine could use a little help.

A final thought. There’s been a lot of talk lately about public perceptions of birding and of birders. (The Big Year, anyone?) Like it or not, Wikipedia is how a sizable chunk of the world gets information. A newbie’s first contact with birding and the ABA might well be via Wikipedia.

A final, final thought. I’m not asking—and neither, I’m sure, would any of my colleagues on staff—for a sugar-coating of the ABA. We just want a thorough, accurate, unbiased, well-informed accounting on Wikipedia of what the ABA is all about. I stand by our product, the American Birding Association. And I’m confident that YOU, contributors to and readers of The ABA Blog, are the best-qualified persons in the world for educating the general public about birders, birding, and the ABA.