Some Philosophical Comments on Birding
Various names or labels are associated with people interested in birds, depending on the extent of their experience with this interest and on whether their interest is avocational or professional. Some of the more frequently encountered labels are explained below:
Birdwatcher: a person whose interest in birds is marginal or intermittent to some degree; includes most persons with any sort of interest, but mainly those who watch the birds at their feeders or in their yards.
Lister: a subset of birders (see next entry) whose primary interest is in seeing and then checking off species on a personal "life list." The British term for this activity--twitcher--indicates the habit of listers to rush off at the drop of the proverbial hat to see a new bird, no matter where it might be. Thus listers tend to have a rather limited focus: to add species to a life list, often without much or any concern for the welfare of birds or their environment. Despite its inherent limitations, listing is often a crucial step in the formation of birders because listing is by far the most important avenue by which most birders enter birding. As long as it is recognized as a first step in a long journey, rather than as a be-all and end-all activity, listing is valuable; it only becomes harmful if those who engage in listing never see the larger field of endeavor in which they might operate to benefit birds, as well as to provide themselves with recreation.
Birder: a person who focuses a moderate to large part of of his or her daily life on activities related to birds. Usually some degree of obsession is manifested by such individuals. Birders always go beyond mere listing in their birding activities and see the "big picture," i.e., that birds need and deserve attention from humans that goes beyond mere personal entertainment.
Ornithologist: a person who works, usually professionally, with birds and bird research projects that add to our knowledge of birds.
A caveat: as is the case with most efforts to categorize humans into neat compartments, it should be noted that few persons engaged with birds fit neatly into any of these categories. Most persons reveal characteristics that indicate they overlap two or more categories listed above, which are not all-inclusive in any event.
A useful system for evaluating human activities is provided by Abraham Maslow. His famous "Hierarchy of Needs" provides a way to view human activities in the context of personal fulfillment.
Those requirements that sustain life Maslow deemed to be physiological needs (including needs for food, water, air, and sex). Once the physiological needs have been fulfilled, safety and security needs must next be met if fulfillment is to be reached. Once safety and security needs are met, emotional needs, especially love, must be fulfilled. Once emotional needs are met, status needs, especially the need of respect for one's work, must be fulfilled. Once status needs are met, so-called Being needs must be met; these include the search for excellence and high principles in one's work, most often achieved via altruistic activities. Should Being needs be fulfilled, then what Maslow called self-actualization can occur, i.e., a person has become the best he or she can be.
Maslow's Hierarchy begins with inwardly directed, self-oriented needs and ends with outwardly directed, non-self-oriented needs.
Interestingly, an effort by Aldo Leopold to analyze the benefits of outdoor recreation--of which birding is certainly one kind--parallels Maslow's effort to analyze the steps toward human fulfillment. In an essay entitled "Conservation Aesthetic," one of four philosophical essays that conclude A Sand County Almanac (1949), Leopold argues that the process of enjoying outdoor recreation proceeds through four phases:
1. Trophy hunting/Certificate acquiring (i.e., the deer head on the wall, the check on the bird check-list)
2. Finding isolation/Getting away from it all in a natural setting
3. Acquiring perceptivity/Seeing beyond the surface of the natural world (i.e., becoming ecology-minded)
4. Engaging in husbandry/Giving back
Leopold in the late 1940s was troubled by the "trophy-hunter who never grows up, in whom the capacity for isolation, perception, and husbandry is undeveloped, or perhaps lost. He is the motorized ant who swarms the continents before learning to see his own back yard, who consumes but never creates outdoor satisfaction."
Like Maslow's view of human fulfillment, Leopold's view of outdoor recreational activities (i.e., birding) reveals it to be a process that proceeds from the self-oriented to the altruistic. That two such fine minds as those of Maslow and Leopold would operate in parallel on such diverse subjects is a testament to the "truth" found in the ideas of each. This coming together of ideas from disparate disciplines is an example of what E. O. Wilson calls "consilience," the unity of knowledge.
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