Food for thought

Larry at the Brownstone Bird blog posted an interesting essay about common vs. rare birds. You can read it here. It got me thinking. I've found that birds I take for granted, like cardinals, are not common for people from other areas, and it always makes me look at them with new eyes. I think there is a difference between being a lister and a birder, and I want to be a birder--not just to have a bunch of checks on the checklist, but to KNOW the birds I see. This morning, not much was going on in my yard, although I did see the house wren again, so I took the time to watch an adult and a young robin "grazing" together and looking at the differences--the speckled breast, the dark cheek spot, the dark beak vs yellow beak on the robin. It gave me as much pleasure to note those differences as a new life bird would have done.

Of course, the competitive side of me wants to see more birds than anyone! Fortunately, I'm too lazy to be a chaser and go all over the world chasing birds like Phoebe Snetsinger (Birding on Borrowed Time) or the father in To See Every Bird on Earth by Dan Koeppel. Both great books, by the way. I highly recommend the Snetsinger book. Another great book on chasing is The Big Year by Pete Dunne. Pete is a natural storyteller. The book is as much a travelog as a birding story and I learned a lot about bird ids reading the book.