ABA rankings; re: tips for beginners

[Joshua Stuart Rose <jsr6@duke.edu>]

Hi C-birders,

As the hummingbird visits to my feeder have picked up, I've been trying
harder to keep ants out. The old trick of vaseline around the feeder post
worked, for a while. Then the sun came up the next morning, and the post -
which is black metal - heated up, and the vaseline melted off, and the
ants came back. Might try putting the goop around the feeder hook rather
than the post. My mother-in-law gave me her feeder (she *never* cleaned
it), but I'm not seeing multiple hummers yet, so am sticking with just one
for now.

On Tue, 25 Jun 2002, Steve wrote:
>
> To beginners,
{snip}
> 4) Please be open to being questioned. This is part of the fun (see #1).

Hey, that's a good one I forgot! Many birders - not just beginners, and
too often including me - take it personally when their identification of a
given bird is questioned. It also discourages people from filing reports
with bird record committees, which is a bad thing, too many people post
rarity reports to e-mail lists and then never send any documentation to
the local BRC.

Don't react defensively if the details of your bird sighting are dissected
or critiqued. Present all the evidence you have. If you have enough,
people will be satisfied. If you don't have enough, it doesn't mean you
didn't see the bird, it only means you weren't careful enough in recording
the details; next time you'll better know what to look for. Every birder
was a beginner at some point, and every birder misidentifies birds, or
identifies them correctly but has the report refused by the state
committee. I had at least 3 or 4 Pomarine Jaeger reports declined by the
Michigan Committee while I was working at Whitefish Point, until the last
one finally came close enough for a photo!

> 7) Draw birds

Another good one! And not just drawing specifically: keep a field
notebook. Record behavior, habitat, weather. Notes like these are
frequently the difference between a Bird Record Committee accepting a
sighting into the state's official records and not accepting it. They are
also often the difference between people who author field guides and those
who just use them.

On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, Karen Bearden wrote:
>
> As far as birds seen in individual states go, the top five in NC are:
> Ricky Davis, 409; Harry LeGrand, 407; Derb Carter, 404; John Wright,
> 398; and Larry Crawford, 396.

Of course, two questions always have to be asked with respect to these
rankings. The first is "who's missing?" We all know that John Fussell was
the first birder to top 400 species in NC. I don't see Will Cook in the
rankings anywhere this year. I'd also guess that Mike Tove would be ranked
pretty high in NC if he reported his total.

Some people don't get around to sending their list reports in by the
January 31 deadline. Others intentionally don't belong to the ABA because
they don't like the way it does business, or because it costs money.
Others belong but don't report their list totals because they think it
emphasizes the wrong aspects of birding.

And this year's report was apparently done quickly and sloppily because of
the ousting of previous editor Blake Maybank, and the duties being
shuffled through a few other folks before landing on Florida Big Year
champ David Simpson. For example, I submitted a Big Day report for NC in
December (Norm Budnitz and I got 81 species) which somehow got omitted; I
think Frank Rheindt and I also did one for January that wasn't included
either. And the NC Big Day record for September is shown in the report as
809 species, which sounds kinda unlikely...

The other question to ask is "Who's that?" The ABA runs completely on an
honor system. They don't check anybody's totals (how could they?), and
they don't require bird sightings to be accepted by the state bird record
committee to be counted on a birder's state list. And BIRDCHAT is full of
anecdotes of people who chase a rarity and leave thinking they've seen it,
while other birders who stay and observe longer eventually confirm that
the bird being observed was not the rarity they thought. That story I
posted a while back by Ken Kaufman about a "Spotted Redshank" he chased
that turned out to be an oil-stained yellowlegs comes to mind; so do some
posts about folks who chased a Eurasian Hobby near NYC and thought they
found it, but the bird seen that day was later confirmed to be a
Peregrine... So when I've been birding and chasing rarities in a state for
a while, and see someone with a really high total for that state that I
haven't yet met or heard of at any of the rarity sites, it makes me a wee
bit suspicious.

By the way, Karen, you missed me on that rundown of NC birders in the ABA
rankings. I have 635 species, which places me in a 7-way tie for 584th
place... (but my Hawai'i birding boosts me all the way up to 236th in the
USA rankings)

Good birding,

Josh


Joshua S. Rose
Duke University
Department of Biology (Zoology, R.I.P.)

jsr6@duke.edu
http://www.duke.edu/~jsr6/