Sparrow that Wasn't

Let me introduce myself--Carl Bernzweig--and add my two cents regarding honesty in the World Series of Birding.

Non-birders, even those intrigued by the idea of competitive birdwatching, have a lot of trouble getting past the idea of the contest results relying on teams' own reports.  The analogy they're most likely to bring up is golf--which I imagine must be rife with cheating.  The best we can do is tell these non-birders that we know we don't lie about our own sightings, that most of the competitors know one another, and if we thought others were just making things up, we all wouldn't spend so many hundreds of dollars and hours on the effort every spring.  It just means too much to us. 

On the other hand, birders understand that while a golfer knows whether he just spent four strokes or six, a competitor scoping a distant, backlit peep may not be so mathematically certain as to which one he's seeing.  And any birder who's ever built a list, whether at leisure over the course of the year or racing the clock on a Big Day, also understands the compulsion to make the bird in view the one you most need.  Wishful birding seems more of a threat to a fair WSB outcome than outright cheating does, and a couple mistakes probably get made by a team or two every year.  The teams all understand this, and I believe most work hard to avoid crediting themselves with unearned species.  It's heartbreaking to think of how many bird sounds we Witchities leave unidentified in the night.

Last year, 11th hour scouts reported a singing Nelson's Sharp-tailed Sparrow, a difficult bird for WSB.  Its location was relatively near the finish line, so most teams would have visited the spot late in the competition when, like us, they'd be over-tired, worrying over holes in their checklists, and very eager to believe any faint sound or little flash of brown was the bird in question.  We spent ten precious minutes there but left empty-handed, convinced the thing would start singing its heart out as soon as we turned the key in the van.  

I'm not sure how many teams actually went gunning for that same bird, but there were probably dozens.   When the checklist of species seen by all teams combined was handed out at the awards brunch, the box beside the Nelson's was unchecked.

3:49 PM - Friday, December 9, 2005 - post comment