At 04:51 PM 02/04/2009 Denise Goodfellow wrote:
Phoebe Snetsinger had the longest bird list in the world, and
some of the
women I guide also keep lists. All I'm saying is that women
are far less
likely to do so than men.
I agree. My experience is that women often keep lists for
somewhat different reasons then men. Men tend to be more into
competition and collecting tick marks on their lists. Almost all
the people I know who somewhat obsessively run hither and yon to
add new birds to their lists are men. Women seem to make lists
more out of curiosity than competitiveness - they tend to
collect data as opposed to tick marks. There are exceptions
though. I've definitely known some women for whom the ticks on
the list were the point of looking for birds, or in some cases,
being shown birds by others.
Personally, I keep track of what I see and where I see it on a
daily basis. I do that by political borders because that's the
easiest well-defined way to do it. At home, the regions I use
are counties - the smaller government subdivisions that each
state is divided into. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when I
get to Australia later this month. Your states are too big a
unit to use for record keeping for my purposes. If there were
well-defined lines telling me which birds were in which of the
bioregions mentioned at the start of this discussion, I'd be
happy to use them for record-keeping. I rarely turn my records
into actual lists of all the birds I've seen within certain
boundaries. I sometimes do it when I've been travelled to a new
place, but more because I'm curious about how much I've seen
rather than because I feel any particular urge to compare the
number to anyone else's number. I think it is safe to say that I
will keep track of how many species I see in Australia just
because my upcoming trip is likely to be the only time I'm ever
there and I want to see as many birds as I can. I don't know how
many species I've seen in my own country because that exact
number just doesn't interest me much.
--
Katrina Knight
Reading, PA, USA
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