Dodgy Birders - Part 1: Bird Identification

In May I turned 60. This makes me nearly old. I've noticed that when you get fully old, you can say exactly what you think about stuff and totally get away with it. It seems to be a privilege tolerantly afforded to the not-here-much-longer. I optimistically assume I'm not yet in that category, so it may be that I won't quite get away with what I plan to write over a few posts...

A topic which has fascinated me for many years is that of dodgy birders. If I were to write an NQS glossary, it would include this entry:

Dodgy Birder: a birder whose sightings you cannot trust one little bit.

Of course, dodginess can feature in many hobbies. In angling, for example, it might involve a fish's claimed weight, or the quantity of a multiple catch, but can also include various behaviours, like poaching waters for which you don't have a ticket, nicking swims that you know have been carefully prepared by another angler, and so on. But the dodgy angler is another blog post altogether. Dodginess in birding generally involves the identification of one or several birds, the numbers seen, and, in the worst cases, the actual existence of those birds at all. So, let's begin by examining a fundamental question...

Why is bird identification important?
I know folk who cannot separate a House Sparrow from a Starling. And interestingly, they don't care. But that's because they're not birders. Birders do care. Birders care greatly about identification, because it is birding's keystone. Our hobby simply could not exist without it; there would be no field guides, no lists, no counts, no common birds, no scarce birds, no rarities, no bird reports, no surveys, no ringing data, no population monitoring, no species-focused conservation, no reintroduction schemes, etc, etc. And whole branches of birdy science would be redundant. Taxonomy, for example. Hmm. Actually, that one might not be so bad...
Anyway, there are lots of activities where identifying birds is not a vital, integral fundament of the thing, but birding isn't one them.

So, next question...

Why does correct identification matter?
Well, if you bird alone and never interact with any other birders in any way whatsoever, and keep all of your nonsense to yourself, it doesn't matter. You can muck stuff up (or make it up) all you like. Feel free. But if you are not a birding hermit, correctly identifying what you see matters a great deal, from the very moment your sighting is shared with another birder. And there are several potential reasons. As an example, let's say matey has identified a pukka rarity on his local nature reserve. What might be the consequences of sharing this discovery with another birder?

Well, the next few minutes/hours of their life might be profoundly influenced by that identification...

• They might start running immediately, with inherent risks to their physical wellbeing.
• They might jump in their car and burn a lot of fossil fuel, with inherent risks to the planet's wellbeing.
• They might stand still in a cold, draughty spot for a long time, inviting nasty chills and shrivelling.
• They might share the sighting with their birding buddies, with obvious ramifications.
• And so on...

A rarity is an extreme example, but it doesn't take much - just an interesting migrant, or passing seabird maybe - to influence what another birder might do now that he wouldn't have done otherwise. When we touch the lives of other birders in that way - the very second we interact with them based upon an identification we have made - surely we bear a responsibility? They're not just some indifferent Joe Public who couldn't give a monkey's what name we give the boring brown thing. They're a fellow birder, a comrade of the anorak, and that should very much mean something. Shouldn't it?

Pied Wheatear twitch, Scilly 2010

A good number of birders (Mrs NQS and I included) hurried breathlessly to this spot on St Mary's because someone shared an identification he'd made. Correct ID clearly mattered to him, and in this case he had happily got it right. But there is always another possibility...

In part 2 of the Dodgy Birders series, we will address the 'Getting it Wrong' scenario, and the options open to us when we do so, with special emphasis on dodginess...