Greetings From The Listserv Hall Of Fame

For years I have been reading the reports on San Diego Birds and thought that there was much ado about nothing in so many cases. Doug Aguillard has repeatedly ranted about the existence of an elite inner circle and their comrades and I figured that he was just crazy and stirring the pot for the sake of stirring the pot. But this latest news about the Le Conte's Sparrow has me wondering if Doug wasn’t right and has secretly been enshrined into his formerly hated inner circle since he has remained silent since the news came out. This can only lead me to believe he saw the bird. From what I can tell from what was posted on the group and from email responses of those people who replied to my emails I find many things amiss in the local birding people. The same people that have so many others looking up to them just flipped each and every one of you off.

First off, the Le Conte’s Sparrow could not be seen from any public thoroughfare so Terry must have been trespassing when he found it. Fair enough, most of us have been guilty of such a minor crime from time to time. Terry Hunefeld, Paul Lehman, Guy McCaskie, Peter Ginsburg, Sue Smith, Gary Nunn, Matt Sadowski , Doug Aguillard and even Tom Benson - from another county - all got a call about the bird on Friday and were able to see it. It is obvious that they all agreed to keep the matter secret as none of them called anyone outside of this secret society to share this news. Puppet Master McCaskie must have been expertly manipulating the strings once again and threatening loss of the secret handshake known only to the group for anyone who spread the word. As Paul Lehman shared in a post about his beloved girlfriend Barbara Carlson, there are people doing a big year that would have liked to see this bird. I can't find anyone who will say that either was there on Friday so I must assume that they didn't know about the bird. Paul couldn't even tell his girlfriend because it was such an important secret? 

In trying to cover their tracks they decided to allow some people to enter the golf course under the ruse that there was permission for one group of a limited number of people to have legal access. This was a bold lie as the group found out that there was no permission upon arriving on the scene. Any number of other people who routinely post to the list about what they find, people like Jay Keller, Mark Straton, Dave Povey, Chris Smith, BJ Stacey, Eric Kallen and Stan Walens all come to mind. Come on, Stan even has a worldwide known bench for birding named after him and no one thought about asking if he might want to see a county first bird. If they find a rare bird I bet all hell erupts if they decide not to share that information immediately. I don’t know of everyone who was there on Saturday but I have learned of some but it isn’t worth mentioning them since they should only be blamed for unassumingly trespassing after being lied to.

Didn’t this same thing happen earlier in the year with the Mongolian Plover and Sharp-tailed Sandpiper? Didn’t these same people try to keep that hidden until word – as it always does – leaked out? And how many other times has it happened? How can it be that Guy McCaskie and Paul Lehman always seem to get access to places that the general public is denied? It is amazing what one can find when the government is open. Searching a federal grant database I do not see either of them listed upon a grant but they are given access to Salt Works whenever they request it. How did they gain the special government powers that permit them to do so or are the local researchers complicit in the trespassing meaning they should lose their grants? Perhaps one of them will publicly profess how this can be legal. Silence should only to interpreted to mean they are guilty.

The absolute hypocrisy of Guy McCaskie and his acolytes is a sin to birders everywhere. They share amongst themselves and demand all be given by others. Sound like our current Congress perhaps? These same people have been doing this same thing for as long as they have been birding. San Diego birding is known across the country as being home to some of the best birders in the country but also as home to some of the most backstabbing birders at the same time. The only way to perhaps get them to change is to find your own birds and not tell any of them about it until it is gone. Give a dose of their own medicine to these self-appointed doctors in this drama. To those of you who do go birding I plead with you to ask people across the nation – not just San Diego and California – about these people. You will be amazed at how horrible they are thought of as people and how far the tales have traveled. 

So go find your birds and don’t share that information with any of these self centered egotistic snobs. If I had the power I would kick them off all the lists and phone trees that they belong to. I had birded for over 30 years all across the country until a car accident in 2001 left me unable to continue. I now find my birds by reading San Diego Birds and clicking on links to photos from the locals who share their photos. And, all the while, I only hope that one of those special birds will fly up to my window and bless me with just a few moments of its life. Perhaps being bedridden and looking out a window is better than having to look any of you in the eye.

Blessed Birding to ALL that share

Todd Ingess
La Jolla CA
San Diego County CA

This Week In Birding: "The Omnipresent Threat Of Male Birders To Women"

Please make the jump to lightspeed and check out Assertiveness Training for Women Birders. YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT, regardless of gender, especially if you like ABA drama.

Ladies, I expect next time I see you in the field you will know I will regard your presence and participation with hostility. Dudes, I feel sorry for those of you who lack the physical equipment of alpha males, but at least you have successfully colluded with optics companies to have compensatory enormous binoculars.

Obviously there are grains of truth underlying her argument here...but this is some really next-level stuff. Just read it.

The Human Birdwatcher Project Presents: Swallowgate

I have written of sketchy birders. I have written of stringers, assholes, liars, and the clueless. What the Human Birdwatcher Project has not covered are birders who take dishonesty to such a level that it is truly staggering. As the nation's #7 birder, you can bet the Global Birder Ranking System has me plugged deeply in to the national rumor mill. My little birds are everywhere, as Lord Varys would say, and they sing many songs to me. You would not believe what they have been telling me lately...

It all started out innocently enough...a young birder doing a Big Year in his home state. He set out to conquer the state's big year record, and he succeeded. There was press coverage, much fanfare, and glory. But very quickly, things turned for the worst...he tumbled from those lofty heights like a Snow Goose full of birdshot . His big accomplishment was nothing more than a vulgar display of myopic arrogance.

Let's set the stage. The year before he set out to shatter the record, he found a state first Violet-green Swallow, which was photographed...but no one else ever saw it, despite other observers rushing to find it. Of course, it is always suspicious when a single observer has a pattern of finding rare birds that otherwise go unseen...but if there is a photo, who can argue with that? During his big year, more than one of his self-found/single-observer rarities were photographed, so there was no real reason for concern.

The obvious problem with photos is that they can be faked...but no birder would ever do that...right? What would be the point? I can only see one...where you want to convince people that you are a hot-shit birder. You want that reputation, which ostensibly sounds crazy, but that is something that some birders find to be very, very important...perhaps because you have nothing else. In fact, for whatever reason, you want that reputation more than you care about watching birds themselves...which seems to defeat the whole idea of "birdwatching" in the first place, and violates the golden rule of birding: don't lie. You can be a dipshit, you can be unskilled, you can be a bad person, and birders will still tolerate you as one of them. But for god's sake, don't lie.

It has come to light that this birder has done just that...through some brilliant detectivework that make other bird police forces look sloppy and lazy by comparison, his state first photo was discovered to have been taken not in his state at all, but in Colorado. It was a farce, and he got caught...there was something amiss with the bird's tertial pattern, and data associated with the photo put the observer in the wrong state at the wrong time. My little birds tell me that after a period of complete denial that anything was wrong, he eventually claimed that the bird was real, he just thought that he could lubricate the record's passage by The Bird Police by using a decent photo. Of course, no one really believes that, and Violet-green Swallow turned out to not be the only rarity he documented with a photo of a different bird taken in a different state. The big year suddenly wasn't so big at all. State birders were plunged into a dark malaise...the light at the end of this tunnel was a long way off.

This is the closest thing one can get to "treason" in birding. With a fake state record and a fake record-breaking big year to claim as his, this birder is, for all intents and purposes, doomed. No birder will trust him for years to come...he will be haunted by the nightmare ghost of a Violet-green Swallow forever. His betrayal is known to many, and not only is he being actively shunned in his own state, but the entire American scene is taking notice. Instead of being a high-profile birder in his home state, his name is now in the toilet, and it will be for the foreseeable future.

Birders don't need this. Young birders do not need to have suspicions of stringing and lying cast upon them...hell, I'm in my 30s, and I still get doubted by old white birders who don't know they are dealing with #7. No birder needs to have the idea put in their head that they can do this and get away with it. Birders do not need to sacrifice a lot of time and money chasing after birds that exist only to serve as a "tick" on someone's fabricated list. eBird does not need fake data. Birders are hard to get along with as it is...if we can't trust what we tell each other, what do we have? Not anything that can be called a community, that's for sure.

And there you have it. Swallowgate. Take it to heart.

Birder Feud! The Hatfields vs. The MacDon...McCoys

Birdchick has one of the best (in terms of entertainment value) blog posts of the year up right here. Do yourself a favor and check it out. Without dipping into the convoluted but worthwhile discussion of how gender plays out in the birding community, I will just say I can relate to Birdchick's position. It's always a surprise when you find out someone who barely knows you has mysteriously built up a shoddy soapbox to spit venom about you in some corner of the internet...the fact that it's based on birding, of all things, makes it even sadder.

That's Not How I Would Have Done It

Birders are hilarious, especially when they find themselves on the internet. We communicate a lot using email lists, and it is quite frequent to find people overreacting and acting phenomenally douchey. Below is a message recently posted to a list, in response to a Marsh Sandpiper (a fucking staggering rarity) found just south of the border in Baja California.

"Yes, of course, go for a tick mark on your list, and end up another blood (drug) cartel statistic. Worse than burning fossil fuels for your tick mark on a piece of paper, play Russian roulette for your list total. Even have a close friend who is extremely high on the Mexico list who says "no way" he's trying for it due to the dangers of going down there. You know, I hope you don't have to worry about your conscience if someone goes for the tick bird and comes back in a pine box, that is if he/she's corpse is even found. Maybe best to also note to use caution in 'chasing' a bird for one's list don't you think to somewhere who has a higher death rate recently from what's going on down there than Vietnam or World War I?"

As someone who was actually recently robbed at gunpoint in Mexico by a large group of armed men, I still find this hilarious. Sure there may be some truth in what he says, but idly mentioning going birding and coming back in a pine box is a bit over the fucking top, don't you think? The part about mentioning fossil fuels is quite good too, as I know for a fact this man just went all the way to St. Paul Island, Alaska, for the specific purpose of finding rare birds.

Look buddy...if you can't take the heat...stay out of the kitchen! And if you don't learn something called "tact", no one will give a damn about what you say, truth or not. Now, off to birdwatching charm school with you.