Dave,
Good post.
In all my years of leading trips, I never thought I knew all the answers.
One of the most frequent answers I gave to people's questions was "I don't
know." As I was challenged by others who did know, I had to decide: "Do I
want to know fact X or distinction Y?" After some feeling of being
inadequate, I figured out that I didn't care about some of those things. I
valued gentleness, peace, leisure more than the quest for perfection.
I truly wish you well in your quest for new questions and new answers.
However, allow this senior citizen the freedom to sit in my rocking chair
and watch you from the porch. Let me wander out with my cronies for a
leisurely afternoon stroll to the mudflats or woods to see some old avian
friends (some we can't hear too well). Let me chase, see, and enjoy a
rarity without asking whether it is male or female, young or old, race A or
B.
Go ahead and enjoy being at the tip of the spear. Let me enjoy being back
in the pack with folks who aren't that intense.
Enjoy the birds!!
Paul
From: David Irons [mailto:llsdirons@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, October 02, 2015 1:32 AM
To: Tom Crabtree <tc@xxxxxxxxxx>; paul sullivan
<paultsullivan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>; OBOL Oregon Birders Online
<obol@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Am I having fun?
Paul et al.,
There was a time when I thought I knew a lot more about birds and birds in
Oregon than I know now (I'm not channeling Yogi Berra here). I may have for
a brief time even accepted the notion that Plumbeous Vireo is a
regularly-occurring bird in Oregon. When I was a comparatively new birder,
the listing opportunities were many. Virtually any trip to a corner of
Oregon that I had not previously visited was sure to add a few new birds to
my state list. I had a blast as I scurried back and forth across the state
chasing my way to 400 species and beyond. I met a lot of fun people, made
several lifelong friends and I even learned a little about the birds I was
seeing. At the time I thought I new a lot, but I was wrong.
As time went on I came up against the point of diminishing prospects for new
state birds. About that same time I started meeting birders whose interests
in status and distribution, vagrancy patterns, molt, weather, vegetation
communities and the finer points of identifying birds was far beyond mine.
Discussions with these folks left me with all sorts of questions. They were
not only questions for which I did not have answers, they were questions
that I had never even considered. Over time I found that pondering such
questions and generating my own unique set of questions and then going in
search of answers for those added a new layer of joy to my birding
activities. Remarkably, every new answer still leads to two or three new
questions. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
Birding has never been more fun for me than it is right now. There is always
a new place to explore and I can be assured that almost every new birder
that I meet has the potential to pose a question that will send me off on a
previously unexplored tangent. It's not tedious, it's not painful and there
is no judgement in it. It's just the way I look at birds. On those rare
occasions when I get to add a new bird to my Oregon list, I still get a
charge out of it. Sometimes I chase and dip, but it rarely elicits more than
a few moments of disappointment because every trip into the field is an
opportunity to learn something new. I will continue to try to initiate
discussions and generate debate in this forum and perhaps get others to join
in the pondering of such questions. I will do it for my own enjoyment and
perhaps inspire others to find the joy that comes with learning something
new and discovering that you don't know as much as you thought you did.
Dave
Non-Curmudgeon
