WHY BIRDING-AUS IS MY FAVOURITE BIRDING ENMAIL LIST
I am a subscriber and contributor to a number of bird lists around the
world, and think Birding-Aus is easily the most lively and interesting one.
There are also here a lot of forgettable contributions and in-jokes for the
happy few , but fortunately email is a very easy medium to throw out what
you do not want to see, so I consider this a minor problem. Of course, I
quite see that I can easily do this because my email comes in on a
university server, so that I do not have to pay for all the spam and gruff
that comes in, while many others are in a less enviable position in this
respect.
The occasional flare-up of tempers, and the unreasonable and sometimes
unforgivably personal attacks on other subscribers, and the cowards who
lurk under alias'es and only seem to try to spread mischief, sadly occur on
all email lists. I think this is partly because "email lists have no
brakes". Earlier, when something in the newspaper irked you, you had to go
to your typewriter, find an envelope, find a stamp, go to the mailbox and
post it, all of which gave you time to cool off, so that in most cases one
stops in the middle of this chain of activities, and the glowing letter of
protest never arrives at the newspaper (where anyway it is once more vetted
before it is printed eventually). But subscribers to an email list like
Birding-Aus, when receiving something that irks them, can sit down at once,
when still glowing hotly, and dash off a reply, which then arrives
unfiltered on the list. There are no brakes and no cooling off periods, and
these outbreaks of regrettable, and often afterwards regretted, language
are the result.
Why then do I still like the birding-aus list so well, even though I
live
so far away that that I never can go and look for those pratincoles,
and not have enough local insight to debate plastic versus paper or calico
bags in your supermarkets. This is because of the very lively discussions,
because of the most interesting debates, and because this list has its
scientists and nature conservationists that actively take part , and always
are willing to help out people and to discuss both environmental, birding
and ornithological problems on the list. I wonder if you all are aware how
lucky you are in this respect? Many of the other list are dominated by one
sort of birders, either those who are always hungry for the next rarity,
those who yearn for the next banding debate, or those who think one should
only talk about the larger conservation issues, all the rest being
insignificant anyway. On Birding-aus you have them all, and I am very happy
I found the list. Please go on the way you are----maybe only ask yourself
now and then: should I send this now, or should I wait a day and feel if it
still feels just as necessary??
With admiring greetings from a once more chilly and wet Tromsø, where
the
temperatures have dived below 10*C again, and where the two swallows of
last weekend clearly did not succeed in making summer.
Wim Vader, Tromsø Museum
9037 Tromsø, Norway
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
www.shc.melb.catholic.edu.au/home/birding/index.html
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