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RE: On Careful Observation

Amen, Mark!  If we - all of us - don't make any "mistakes" any longer, stop
immediately and check pulse! 
Old Chinese proverb (or maybe it was just Brooklyn NY or LA growing up):
"Man who takes wrong exit and looks around, learns about new neighborhood.
Man who travels on as always, eventually becomes blind with eyes wide open."
...or something like that1

Harry Krueger
Boise, ID

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-birdtalk@utahbirds.org [mailto:owner-birdtalk@utahbirds.org] On
Behalf Of Mark Stackhouse
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2005 3:52 PM
To: birdtalk
Subject: Re: On Careful Observation

I guess I'm not quite through with this thread either. I have a couple of
additional things I'd like to say on this.

First, I fully understand the difficulties of identifying waterthrushes. I
see several hundred waterthrushes of both species every year, mostly on my
tours in Mexico (one rainy morning on the Veracruz trip last October we had
several dozen Louisiana Waterthrushes feeding in the middle of the road
along about a kilometer). Sometimes we can see both species essentially
"side by side." I would never underestimate how hard it is to tell these
species apart - some individuals are really tough to identify. The one from
Arizona, however, is so classically a Louisiana in every respect that it
would be a good example to study for birders wishing to learn more about how
to recognize this species, especially those from someplace like Utah, where
few Louisiana's are seen. My expressed surprise was that there would be any
controversy over this bird in Arizona, where there are many, many birders
with plenty of experience to be able to identify a Louisiana Waterthrush
like this one. As it turns out, the "consensus" 
was apparently from the birder's register at the location; the bird was
originally reported and correctly identified by Gary Rosenberg in early
December. However, many birders may not have heard about the report (Kudos
to Birdtalk and Birdnet, and all who submit reports here, for helping to
keep us all well-informed).

Second, the only way to avoid misidentifying birds is to never go birding.
I'm not sure that I misidentify birds any less frequently now than I did
twenty years ago. Hopefully, I'm a bit better about catching my mistakes. No
one should ever feel badly about having called a bird "wrong," nor should
they ever be afraid to admit to having made a mistake, or to not knowing
enough to make the correct identification. 
No one will ever learn all there is to know about birds. As I am fond of
telling people on my tours, when one of them (or myself) is caught in this
moment of embarrassment, "there's only one difference between the
experienced birder and the beginner - the experienced birder has
misidentified a whole lot more birds than the beginner."

Good birding!

Mark

Mark Stackhouse
Westwings, Inc.
westwings@sisna.com
801-487-9453 (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA)
011-52-323-285-1243 (San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico)

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     BirdTalk:
To subscribe, e-mail:  birdtalk-subscribe@utahbirds.org
To unsubscribe, e-mail:  birdtalk-unsubscribe@utahbirds.org
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