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  • I Saw What I Said I SawWitnesses to Birds and Crimes
  • John Nelson (bio)

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Illustration by Jane Raese

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We do not see things as they are.We see them as we are.

The Talmud [End Page 37]

Every birder knows the experience: an impossible bird has been sighted. Sometimes the reports of these sightings are offered by strangers who see me out with my binoculars and need to share some awesome bird discovery. Usually the calls come from friends or family members who know I’m bird-mad, ready to recognize and appreciate the remarkable creatures they’ve observed. Some reporters, having looked through bird books, are pretty sure they know what they’ve seen; my job is to confirm. Others expect me to identify a bird, now gone, that I’ve never laid eyes on. The problem of impossibility enters when they describe their birds. Vagueness I can handle—“a hawk, a big hawk, really big, huge, like an eagle.” Well, maybe it was an eagle. The situation becomes touchier when the collective field marks they’ve noted don’t match any species known on earth, or within five thousand miles of this sighting. I don’t want to quell their burgeoning bird fervor, so I can’t just say they’re wrong. I suggest possible sources of error and speculate about more likely suspects they might have misidentified. “You know,” I add, encouragingly, “expert birders make mistakes too.” Most reporters, chastened, acknowledge the likelihood of error. Others sound unconvinced, cheated.

Most such misidentifications stem from a mix of inexperience, inattention and wishful thinking. In rare cases, the unwillingness to concede error is so intransigent, so scornful of disconfirming evidence, that “error” hardly seems the word for it. One day last spring, at a refuge in coastal Massachusetts, I checked to see if the ospreys had arrived yet at their platform nest. In the parking lot I was accosted by a giddy couple, who told me they’d just found two bald eagles on the nest. I walked to where I could see the nest and raised my binoculars. “Ospreys,” I told the couple. “Wonderful birds. They breed here every year.” No, the couple insisted, bald eagles. I opened my Sibley guide and pointed out various differences between ospreys and bald eagles. No, bald eagles. I set up my spotting scope, at 32× magnification, and let the couple view the birds at their leisure. Bald eagles. “Eyesight should learn from reason,” Johannes Kepler proclaimed, but sometimes the eyes refuse the lesson.

It’s easy to mock extreme unreasonableness, in the birding world or otherwise, but I don’t have to rely on fools to find impossible birds. Often I get them on my own. On a birding tour of Peru I went out alone each day during lunch breaks and saw at least three birds that defied all identification. Though I didn’t have a camera, I did what a good birder should do: observed carefully for as long as possible, took precise notes on field marks, considered habitat and behavior. But when I looked for [End Page 38] the birds in my Peru book, they weren’t there. I told our guide about my sightings and suggested what seemed like the closest possibilities, but he dismissed them out of hand. Wrong season for one species, wrong altitude for another. I’d seen birds, certainly, but which birds he couldn’t say. Again, every birder knows the experience. We doubt our eyes or our minds. The vast lore of birding is laced with visions of mysterious birds and confident identifications later proven wrong. In Birdscapes, Jeremy Mynott tells the story of two “bitterly opposed parties” who nearly came to blows in the Turk’s Head Pub in an argument over whether a marsh bird that appeared in England in 1973 was a spotted crake or a sora. To settle the dispute, the opponents agreed to trap the bird, but it flew off before they could do so.

Why do competent birders think they’ve see birds they haven’t seen? In The Complete Birder, Jack Connor faults most...

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