To Count or Not to Count: A Birder’s Question

John Nelson

Should birders count birds they have heard but never seen? Philosophers might call it an epistemological question. Can we know the world by sound as reliably as we know it by sight? In some cases, it can be an ethical question. Are you a trustworthy reporter? For birders who keep lists of birds they have experienced, it is an accounting question. If you identify a bird solely by sound, should you include it in the list, omit it, or qualify it with a “heard only” asterisk? Birders must answer the question themselves. Birds do not care whether their names appear on our lists, nor, for the most part, does anyone else.

I was seduced into birding by the visual beauty of birds. Cycling along the back roads of Essex County, I came upon eye candy such as Glossy Ibises, Green Herons, and Baltimore Orioles. I started birdwatching to be dazzled by more birds. I soon discovered that “birdwatcher” is a misnomer. On field trips led by Mass Audubon and the Brookline Bird Club, I scanned landscapes and seascapes, growing more alert to movements, better able to identify moving birds, but the trip leaders, I realized, were finding birds by hearing them, often with remarkable precision. I had to become a birdlistener. I got some tapes of bird songs and tried to memorize the sounds whenever I went anywhere in my car. My dog Sierra, a regular passenger, editorialized. Warbler and sparrow songs did not spark her attention, but she growled in protest whenever she heard the call of the Common Loon. She had never seen or heard a loon. Had she been traumatized by a loon in a past life? When she heard the thunder-pumping of an American Bittern, she whimpered and gazed at me accusingly. What the hell, man? That is a bird?