Tuesday, September 15, 2009

-- Why The Rush, He Asks? --

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This week Bill Pulliam starts us off, not with a Tennessee ground search narrative, but with a bit of a rant about a rush to judgment, with statistics to boot! I don 't completely agree with all his points (and those who see the debate as boiling down to a matter of fiscal priorities certainly won't), but one point I especially concur with runs as follows:

"Most birders, even experts who should know better, vastly overestimate the efficiency of the transcontinental birding community as a bird-finding machine. The vast majority of individual North American birds live out their entire lives without ever being seen, identified, twitched, or reported by any birder. For dozens of individuals of a woodland species to go undetected decade after decade even in the eastern U.S. is in fact exceedingly easy, not virtually impossible."
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