Good stuff, Scott, and thanks for reminding us about Bartram's Travels (which Google). Here's my favorite Big Walk of all time: http://www.pianonoise.com/Composer.Buxtehude.htm Runner-up: http://articles.philly.com/1989-08-01/sports/26147123_1_jim-rooker-cart-towns And of course: http://blog.aba.org/2011/08/update-from-the-2665-mile-bird-walk.html

Er, along for the "ride"... :-)

Hey, Rob. I'm out of my league on this one, so the following may well be messed up, but here goes: I take a Julian year, in the broad sense, to be a time period that is 365 24-hour periods or 366 24-hour periods, in distinction from a sidereal year, which is a time period that is nearly, but not precisely, fixed. A sidereal year is approximately 365.25 "days," whereas a Julian year is either 365 or 366 "days." The question, in my mind, isn't the starting date for a Julian or sidereal year. Rather, it's the length, which is oddly variable for a Julian year, but nearly fixed for a sidereal year. Where's an astro-historian when you need one?... :-)

An antshrike? Maybe what I thought was a winnowing snipe was really a Barred Antshrike? Talk to me.

Great idea, Dennis. Glad I thought of it... :-) No, seriously, we're working on putting together a sorta Top 10 list of posts that have generated particularly intense commentary. We'll publish that in Birding. Offhand, I don't see the need to convert the content to PDF format. Folks can just go straight to the post, then see all the comments below. If you want a printout (but why?), you can press PRINT. And if you actually want a PDF, you can press "CONVERT TO PDF." Which would be a bit like downloading the contents of your smartphone to the medium of 8-track casette... :-) Thanks again, Dennis. You'll see your suggestion in the pages of Birding, soon enough.

The problem, Bill, is two self-imposed restrictions: I have to be able to walk to the place from my house, and I can't use bins or a scope. Good luck to you and the Boulder County Julians. I hope the name sticks. I shall do my darnedest to see to it that it does!

"This post got me wondering what it would be like to do overlapping big years - start a big year on January 1, start another on February 1, start another on March 1, etc. and keep them all going." Lynn, you are the Garry Kasparov of Big Year birders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Kasparov#32_simultaneous_computers.2C_1985 :-)

"...I am always interested in HOW people bird as much as why and where they bird." I totally agree with you, Mel. And on that note, be sure to see "A Birding Interview," appearing in the (very imminent) May/June 2013 Birding. It's as if you and the interviewee were in a Vulcan mind meld. You'll see. Also: "I learn from my fellow birders (women and men alike) the lessons they pass along." The best lessons are the ones that have nothing to do with birding per se. Mel, you've importantly influenced the way I give public talks. (Cf. your exposition, equal parts brilliant and subtle, in the foothills of Cheyenne Mountain. Remember? Well, I sure do!)

Tomorrow (Sat., June 15th, 2013) my project will take a strange and perverted twist. I promise to post about it. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, I must go now, to read about your 647 species and 1,000 awesome experiences.

Touche, Robert, but I haveta confess: The idea isn't original with me. I got it from, ahem, Albert Einstein, whose little "Relativität" is one of the finest specimens of truly interesting and original writing I've ever laid eyes on. (I'd give anything for a fresh, modern translation into American English. Where are Rick Wright and Ned Brinkley when you need them?) Einstein became fascinated by the, er, "relativity" of the human condition. Each of us has our own here and now; our own past, present, and future; our own place in the universe, distinct from every other observer's place. That sounds like philosophy, no doubt, but it's cold, hard physics. The following paradox is gratifying to me: The so-called rule-breakers are simply obeying the laws of physics, but the people who follow the supposed rules are living a lie... :-)

This is a serious question: To those of you who favor a stable field guide checklist taxonomy and sequence, on what authority would you base it? The Peterson Guide you grew up with in the 1960s? The Nat Geo you grew up with in the 1980s? The Sibley Guide you grew up with in the 2000s? Still, aren't y'all tilting at windmills? I mean, even if you aspire to keep the linear sequence stable, what do you about the massive changes that have nothing to do with checklist sequence per se? I just whipped out my Peterson 4th from 1980, the bird book I grew up with, and it's got Blue-gray Tanager and Eurasian Goldfinch, but not Purple Swamphen and Eurasian Collared-Dove; it's got Sharp-tailed Sparrow, but not Nelson's and Saltmarsh sparrows; it's got Cave Swallow in an appendix with Stolid Flycatcher and Antillean Palm Swift, but it's got Corn Crake, Scarlet Ibis, and even King Vulture in the main text; it's not got Cackling Goose, but it's got something called Rufous-sided Towhee; etc., etc. Hey, no diss at all on Peterson-4; it was great at the time. But there have been massive changes, these past 30+ years, to our checklists in ways that have nothing to do with linear sequence. If you keep the checklists stable, you're still constantly updating with splits and lumps, new distributional knowledge (think tubenoses), truly new distribution (think Cave Swallow), newly introduced and established exotics, extinction and extirpation, deletions (Peterson-4's got Cape Petrel, Greater Antillean Bullfinch, and Caribbean Coot), and a lot more. I (still) want a field guide that helps me organize and make sense out of all the avian diversity around me--and that is best accomplished by a biological approach that admits current knowledge about morphology and behavior, status and distribution, and, yes, taxonomy and systematics.

Some readers may not realize that Bird-Lore, in which TR's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue patch list appears, is an earlier name of the ABA's great journal North American Birds.

Note, too, that TR is following the AOU taxonomy of the day: doves before hawks; orioles before blackbirds; and so forth, all the way to thrushes at the very end. To folks who pine away for a "stable checklist," when loons were "always" first and the House Sparrow was "always" last, it's a pleasant fantasy. The AOU Check-list from the late 19th century was even more different from the checklist of our formative years than is the AOU Check-list from the early 21st century. And it will forever change, and we birders will forever revel in the wonderful and exhilarating new knowledge, awareness, and understanding. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

"A list good enough, as it was noted by Andrew Core on the ABA's Facebook group, to put him 72nd on eBird's top 100 for the District of Columbia." I bet TR's list for that eBird hotspot is #1 all-time!

Continuing along the same line as Tony Leukering, Tim Avery provides this commentary: http://utahbirders.blogspot.com/2013/04/ebird-show-me-those-unverified-reports.html Tim's commentary, posted to the Utah Birders blog, is really worth the read, in my opinion. Tim works us through some great examples, and has created compelling graphics that could easily be incorporated by eBird.

"When that American bittern showed up in HI this past winter, did the Hawaiian-language publications interrupt the flow of their Hawaiian prose and use the English name of the bird? I surely hope not." I suspect--but where're Lance Tanino and Eric VanderWerf when ya need 'em??--that those Hawaiian-language publications did indeed use the English name of the bird. The other day, I was looking at the brochure of a Dutch bird tour company; the whole thing was in Dutch--except for the impeccably rendered standard English names of all the great birds tour participants can hope to see in Portugal, Texas, and Morocco. Also, I recently received a Chinese-language email; I didn't have a clue about any of it, except for all the standard English names. And it's my experience that most Spanish-speaking birders in the western hemisphere elect to use the standard English names of the birds they're seeing and talking about. So, for better or for worse, English, it seems, is the lingua franca of today's global birding community.

Me, too. :-)

Great, but you're barking up the wrong tree. It is the American Ornithologists' Union (AOU), not the American Birding Association (ABA), that determines what we call birds. The idea of an ABA nomenclature, separate from an AOU nomenclature, did gain some traction, about 40 years ago. In due course, folks backed off. It was better, the argument went, to have a single authority than a Tower of Babel. But I do question whether that one authority is as, hmm, authoritative as some of us imagine. Open up the pages of Science, BirdWatcher's Digest, and the Washington Post--credible publications all--and you'll see red-winged blackbirds and American robins, not Red-winged Blackbirds and American Robins. Go online, and you'll see more widgeons than wigeons; go into people's homes, where they keep conures and amazons; and go out into the field, where folks cheerfully speak of redbirds and wild canaries, of buzzards and marsh hawks and, yes, even chicken hawks. Then there's the matter of all the folks in North America who speak in languages other than English. I wonder: How many people in Québec really say Urubu à tête rouge?--the AOU-compliant name for the bird whose scientific name is Cathartes aura. For that same bird, Mexican ornitho-lexicographer Louise C. Schoenhals gives us the following: aura cabeza roja, águila ratonera, alfaneque, aura, aura común, joti, patatuco, viuda, zope solitario, zopilote, and zopilote cabeza roja. And then there are the other Spanish-language dialects and birderly traditions of Central America--which, Michael Retter is quick to remind us, is a part of North America. It's a good thing--eh?--that the species doesn't get as far north as Nunavut, what with the rich linguistic traditions of that territory's official Inuinnaqtun and Inuktitut languages.

Here's a mind-bending photo quiz: http://www.birdfellow.com/journal/2011/08/24/a_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_birds If you haven't seen this quiz, give it a whirl. When I attempted this quiz--and it's a full-on, well-composed, frame-filler image--I was way in the wrong order. The quiz is an eye-opener and a mind-bender.

Thanks, guys, and I'm not trying to be difficult, but: 1. Louisiana Waterthrushes, Spotted Sandpipers, and Palm Warblers bob their tails. 2. A tail that goes downward also goes upward. (Although I'd say you're getting somewhere with "wagging" and "flicking.") Anyhow, this rather gets at the point I'm trying to make. How do you describe, in words or pictures, in the field guide medium, "obvious tail-bobbing" and "distinctive downward tail wagging"? Is the only way to identify a Gray Flycatcher by getting experience in the field? Or can it be learned from a book? I have a confession to make: I could never figure out from books the tail-dipping thing. I had to go and see the actual behavior (i.e., exhibited by birds of known identity in the field) to learn it.