The other day I was surfing some of my favourite blogs, when I found a (typically) well-written post on "listing" by Clare at his thoroughly excellent The House and other Arctic Musings. In it he wrote "You don't have to look very far to find people who extensively list who have a deep appreciation for birds" and went on to mention me and a couple of other bird bloggers/listers. It was a very interesting statement to make, and in context I got the impression that Clare felt he had to make it: despite his personal reservations about listing, Clare was saying that you can be a lister but ALSO appreciate birds. Like all interesting birding statements, it got me thinking...

I was genuinely hesitant about doing it though. I asked a few birding friends whether I should or not - and they were puzzled why I would even ask them: it'll be interesting, was the usual answer. Six weeks into 2006, and I've kind of remembered why it was I wasn't ever going to keep a year-list again...

Birding, like any popular pastime (I actually prefer "way of life" but that's a whole other post), is deeply tribal. Birders are natural categorisers: 'species' or 'subspecies'; 'common' or 'rare'; 'must-see' or 'trash'; 'seen it' or 'not seen it'. We do it all the time. I don't like to speak for anyone else, but for me it's almost a subconscious reaction. I see a bird, I fit it into a category of some sort: 'stop the car' or 'drive past'; 'I know that one' or 'what on earth was that'...I could go on. None of this would matter very much, but most of us also carry that over into how we mentally order other birders - and sometimes that does matter. When we categorise other birders, what we're really doing is judging each other. I know that when I turn up, say, in Los Angeles or Singapore as soon as I open my mouth birders will hear my accent, know immediately that I'm not local, and make a snap-judgement on my level of skill or knowledge - and it's more than likely they'll decide that I'm not as 'good' as they are. They may notice that I'm carrying round some pretty expensive optical gear, but - hey - many birders do these days, and spending money doesn't make you a good birder - it just means that you have a lot of money, or a lot of debt! Within seconds I've been categorised (which fortunately is not as painful as it sounds)...

Whether I am any 'good' or not, is not an issue for me. If someone thinks I'm a 'dude' (ie a 'beginner') that's fine - in local terms I probably am, and I welcome the advice that most local birders will then offer to help me out. If after talking to me or birding with me they change their opinion and move me from one category to another, that's also fine. I really don't mind. What I would mind, though, is being dumped into a category that seems to have some very negative connotations...

Which of course brings me to "listing" and being a "lister". Nothing seems to be quite as damning as being categorised as a 'lister'. Wherever birders gather, on one one side of the metaphorical room you'll find the 'listers', and on the other the 'non-listers'. And the 'non-listers' will be looking at the 'listers' and making important decisions about them as birders. Not about their knowledge or about how helpful or generous they might be with their time or skills - but about their integrity, about whether they actually like birds or just see them as a tick in a book.

It's hard to believe that this thinking is still prevalent, but it is. The debate on 'birders' vs 'listers' in the UK is as heated as anywhere else in the world, and many birders - whether they like it or not - are still seen as belonging to one category or the other.

Why should this be? There are all types of birders, just as there all types of birds, yet birders that keep lists are somehow more open to criticism than the supposedly more gentle folk who wander dreamily around their gardens looking at nothing but sparrows. It's ridiculous. Some of the best field-birders I've ever met keep lists. For some big listers every bird they see is an identification challenge - not because they don't recognise it as soon as they lay binoculars on it, but because they're open to refining the accepted ID criteria, and are always willing to learn more. On the other hand I've met birders who are proud that they've never left their local patch, and couldn't identify a new bird if it opened the relevant page in a field-guide and ran up and down besides an illustration of itself. They know next to nothing about what's going on in the larger world, because they've never looked into it. Don't get me wrong, I've met listers who have a notebook full of ticks against birds they've been shown but wouldn't recognise again - and sometimes can't even remember on which guided trip they saw them - and I've met local-patch birders who are expert on every aspect of the area that they've studied for years and have a wealth of knowledge they've steadily built up.

And that's the point: I don't care one way or another whether people keep lists or not. What I do care about - what I think matters far more - is what people do with their "lists" if they keep one. If a list is just a run of names and nothing more, it's pretty much worthless to anyone other than the list owner. That's not to say it's not valid or not worth keeping, but in the bigger scheme of things it has no value. If, however, that list is made part of a wider database then it can be very valuable indeed. To get a big world list, you have to travel a vast amount. You need to go to parts of the world where probably relatively few birders will have ever been. You need to see an awful lot of birds. If these sightings are shared with conservation organisations - local and international - then ranges can be mapped, population changes can perhaps be established. Important conservation decisions can be partly made on the basis of people's lists. That's true at the local patch level all the way up to the regional level.

Just think about what is learnt when the data is shared. Take a look at the patterns uncovered by the 'listers' who take part in the annual Christmas Bird Counts in North America: the declines in wintering populations, the changes in occurrence in some species. Read up the accounts of the great pioneer 'listers' of hundreds of years ago - people like Audubon, Baird, Steller, or Pallas, who opened up new frontiers and changed people's perceptions about birds for ever: they may not have been listers in the current sense of the word, but what difference is there between these explorers and the 'listers' who right now are pushing into new areas in, say, South America or Indonesia and coming back and sharing their sightings with BirdLife International or local conservation bodies (I suppose one big difference is that today's listers don't tend to collect quite so many specimens thankfully...)?

If the day-lists and life-lists, the patch lists and backyard lists, and the massive amount of data contained within them aren't shared, it's obvious how much information is lost. It's obvious that important trends could go unnoticed. Vital decisions that might affect populations of birds long into the future can't be made correctly when the decision-makers dont have access to the data that they need...

If I had my way the debate wouldn't be about 'lister' vs 'non-lister' at all - it would be about 'data-sharers' vs 'data-suppressors'. In my opinion every single birder who has ever kept a list, made a record in a notebook, who feeds the birds in their garden or pushes further and further out from their local area (or even gets onto an aeroplane once a week) should be a 'data-sharer'.

Birds need whatever help they can get these days, and if we care about them in any way at all, we should be helping them. And what could be easier than sharing our sightings and records with the conservation bodies operating in the places that we make them? Who knows how the information they are given might be used. It's not always possible to predict, but one thing is true: if it's never collected and never submitted - it can certainly never be used...

So to get back to why I keep a list. Well, hopefully people reading this blog will look beyond the 'list' itself and think about what I try to do by posting and making available the data I collect...and then I won't feel the need to defend myself by writing long explanations like this one again...