Glen White raises an interesting question.
According to Glen and most people involved in the ticking debate, we cannot
count birds we have 'only heard'. Yet we can count birds we have 'only
seen'. I wonder why? Call is often a better identifyer than sight. For some
species call is the only reliable identifying feature in the field. Calls
are often prettier than plumages. Overall, the difficulty of hearing the
call of birds probably is much the same as that of seeing them - although
the distributions of difficulty in registering calls vs sightings differ
by species. And while calls can vary within the species, so can plumage. It
all seems a rather arbitrary privileging of sight - especially when species
are increasingly differentiated on the basis of DNA*.
Why don't 'we' (not me actually, and presumably not sight or hearing
impaired birders) start ticking only those birds we have seen AND heard?
Personally I record birds I've seen, birds I've heard, and even dead birds
- noting their 'status' in my records. I differentiate between birds I've
scoped and studied well and those I've only glimpsed - whose 'ticks' I
don't give as much weight as those for birds I've seen three or more times
and in different states. Since its not a competition (is it?), since I want
to record my varied experience of birds, and since no-one's tally of ticks
is a matter of scientific importance, who cares?
Incidentally, I was just as excited finding a beachcast Sooty Tern [bright
and shiny, but admittedly not calling] at Busselton WA last week, as I was
to see my first - live, visible and calling - Red Winged Fairy Wren on the
same day.
Pat
*No, I don't accept that this is also a matter of sight. DNA is not
visible - it is technically rendered into a visible format. Presumably for
the benefit of the hard of hearing.
Pat O'Malley
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