[Birdtalk] apology

[Dave Hanscom]

Dear fellow birders,

bad news:  I screwed up!   :-(

more bad news:  It's not the first time.

good news:  I learned some important lessons from it that I most 
            certainly won't repeat.

Thanks to several of you, I now know more about the ABA rules for listing 
birds and about how to, and how not to, behave when looking for certain 
rare species.  As a relative beginner to the hobby of birding, and to 
keeping a list of the birds I see, I'm afaid I haven't taken the care I 
should have to do things properly.

My apologies for my previous email.  I was naive enough to think it would 
discourage people from going up there, rather than encouraging them, when 
they found out they were unlikely to see anything.  I didn't notice that 
the person who originally found the bird had asked people to be satisfied 
with just an audible.

Some of you have commented about my "chasing the bird all over the 
mountain".  I did hike up the hillside, mostly without lights, but 
occasionally turned one on when the bird seemed to be close enough to see.  
It turned out that my spotlight died, so my only light source was a small 
headlamp.  Most of the time I was just sitting on the ground waiting for 
him to sing again.  Hopefully I didn't upset the bird too much.

I also hope that my ignorance won't prevent people from informing the Utah 
birding community about unusual sightings, as one emailer suggested.  
Hopefully the bottom line from all this is that we all have learned more 
about what is, and what isn't, appropriate birding behavior.

I will certainly be more careful in the future.  Lesson learned!  No more
rants or character defamation is necessary.   :-)

Dave Hanscom