Two people break 10,000 species, and on the same day? Can it be? (1 Viewer)

Bismarck Honeyeater said:

I have stayed out of the ‘best birder’ tangent of this thread, till now. My view is that there is no such thing as the ‘best birder.’

It would be necessary to define ‘birder’ first, and I suspect everyone has a different idea of what that means.

Quantifying the ‘best world lister’ is simple (as long as by best, one means numerically highest).

It might also be possible to define ‘best patch birder,’ if by that one means most species found, measured against the perceived productivity of a site.

Is best only defined by finding stuff, or might there be other considerations too?

So, first decide the criteria, then analyse the data.

Maybe it calls for a new thread - ‘What is a birder?’ Then we could have the thread - ‘Who is the world’s best birder?

(I suspect there will be almost as many answers to the first question as there are birders - whatever they are.) 😘

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Paul Chapman said:

Patch birders
World birders
Birdwatchers
Birders
Photographers
Birdfinders
People's Birding Front of Somerset

Splitters. 😀

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opisska said:

I didn't want to imply that "patch birders are better", but that in world listing, the actual skill of the person is obscured by the fact that we do not know how much help they had in seeing the birds, so simply comparing numbers isn't telling much. It really is a bit of a weird sport when you can pay professionals to do it for you. Doesn't mean it can't be fun.

I was not even referring to "patch birders" in the typical sense. I know people who travel quite a lot, but within Poland or WP or whatever and consistently find rarities at various sites. Looking at Polish alerts for example, it's striking how much do the names of the finders repeat ...

As for the "privilege", I think that's more of an excuse. We live in the 21st century, there are many opportunities for flexible, remote or part-time work. Obviously, living in Europe is a privilege, but once that is attained, then birding is a choice - I know many people who "do not have the time, because of work" and then they spend the money earned on all sorts of needless stuff.

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Farnboro John said:

AFAIK most if not all professional athletes have managers, coaches, dietitians etc. Hiring professionals makes sense at the edge of possibility.

It's no belittling of an achievement to suggest it involved standing on the shoulders of giants. You still have to turn up and see the birds and goodness knows that can be quite enough of a challenge.

John

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Farnboro John said:

Unfortunately I find this as over-simple as much of what Kaufmann writes, which is why I don't enjoy his writing.

If you are enjoying birding but are kidding yourself that you are finding new stuff by stringing (intentional or not) then it doesn't matter whether you are enjoying it a little or a lot, your birding is based on falsehood and you are neither a good nor a great birder. If you know you are doing this or if you deny publicly what everyone else knows (e.g. refusing to change an identification in the face of knowledgeable advice) you are also not a great human being.

To be a good ordinary birder (which is a fine thing to be) you have to be honest with yourself and others, be open to learning experiences and value improving your skills above being right. If you aren't interested in learning you are a dude at best and a bad birder at worst.

Within these constraints there is a heck of a lot of room to undertake birding in a huge amount of different ways and hold a lot of opinions with which others may or may not agree, leading to many protracted discussions with more opportunities to learn.

John

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Richard D said:

I think the point Kaufmann is making is that identification need not be important. To you and many birders identification is a key aspect of birding, but it isn't for everyone.

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wheatearlp said:

Is the suggestion that people are happy looking at birds without identifying them? Or do they identify some, but don't worry about the ones they can't ID?
That does seem quite odd to me, that there are people without the curiosity to put a name to/label on what they're looking at!

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Richard D said:

I think the point Kaufmann is making is that identification need not be important. To you and many birders identification is a key aspect of birding, but it isn't for everyone.

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Farnboro John said:

And I am making the point that identification is central to birding. You can be a dude or a robin stroker without knowing or caring what you are looking at but you can't be a birder. There's more to birding at any level at all than "look at the pretty colours". You have to be interested in the birds.

John

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wheatearlp said:

Is the suggestion that people are happy looking at birds without identifying them? Or do they identify some, but don't worry about the ones they can't ID?
That does seem quite odd to me, that there are people without the curiosity to put a name to/label on what they're looking at!

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Andy Adcock said:

Being honest, I'd never heard of him but reading his 'Wiki' page, there is this

'Once, hearing a recording of a dawn chorus in Bolivia, he realized that one of the sounds was an antwren of the genus Herpsilochmus—but since he knew all the sounds of those birds, he knew he was hearing a previously unknown species. The following year, the new species was discovered.'

This sounds very like the way (the way it was told to me anyway) that Paul Holt discovered that the hitherto endemic, Nepal Wren Babbler, was also present in India.

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vergan said:

Maybe not certain for birds and tours to wacth birds somewhere in places like PNG, but I could bet a small ammount that most of people paying to go to antarctica, or to "sea mammal" pelagics are not primarily motivated on the id or their lists of sea mammals.

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Paul Chapman said:

I estimate that of say 120 attendees on the Heritage Expeditions Birding Down Under trip in December 2023, less than 25% had any real interest in the identification of most bird species.

(It came as a bit of a shock to be honest to discover that we were called "the birders" and were in the minority of attendees! Certainly, some of us including me were pretty slow off the mark in making it clear that we wanted to know for instance about a Snares Island Snipe sighting. It would have been nice if some effort had been made to tell us about it so that we could have tried to connect.... We were looked on as odd in that regard and some of the other birders were not even that odd. 😬)

All the best

Paul

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Richard D said:

I've met a lot of walkers who enjoy watching the waders on the creek who don't know how to or simply aren't interested in identifying the species. It's possibly more true of some groups than others - ducks are another group where people sometimes just seem happy knowing they're ducks.

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Richard D said:

I think the point Kaufmann is making is that identification need not be important. To you and many birders identification is a key aspect of birding, but it isn't for everyone.

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