I too was taken aback by that off-hand remark in the "Post" article
where the resident birder claims that "all birders lie."  I don't know
tho' that I was "offended" as some of y'all were, so much as rolling my
eyes at it.  First off, past experience has taught me that if you are
ever interviewed, the writer will invariably seize upon the stupidest
thing you say (and you *will* say one or more stupid things; it's
inevitable) and print it.  Secondly, remember that words on a page can
be as uninformative as words on a computer screen.  Who among us hasn't
typed something online that they meant with a big wink and a hearty
sense of humor that was instead interpreted by someone out there in the
ether as being meanspirited, ignorant and downright offensive?
I'm quite sure, despite the fact that I don't know any of the people
being interviewed nor the article's author, that the remark was intended
as a throw-away, "humanizing" joke about us exceedingly peculiar people
who drive and paddle and fly around chasing after birds that we stare at
through complicated and expensive optical devices as if to verify that
the drawing on page 42 in one of our dozens of favorite guidebooks, does
actually exist off the page, at a time when perfectly normal people are
still fast asleep.  I doubt the birder being quoted really meant to give
the impression to laypersons that when we say we drove off to a mosquito
plagued bog at 6:30 on a humid Sunday morning to try to catch a glimpse
of a Black-Crowned Night heron, but instead we heard at least two
Virginia Clappers, saw a Little Blue Heron, seventy-five Red-Winged
Blackbirds, and three Marsh Wrens, what we really saw were two
blood-sucking insects that mutiliated our knees and elbows but thought
that was an unimpressive story, so we made all the birds up.  Of course,
we *did* see those baneful insects as well, and if we were being
interviewed, we'd be sure (the rule of stupidity always being in effect)
to mention those mosquitos and the horrible, itching, pustulating bites
they left behind, which had us scratching and scratching and scratching
while we studied those Clappers, Herons, Blackbirds and Wrens.  And in
the article the next day, the quote will read something like this;
"Birder Laura Appelbaum set out to visit Dark and Dreary Bog yesterday
in search of the elusive Black-Crowned Night Heron, but what made the
greatest impression on her were the trophies she brought back from her
hunt; a series of painful bug bites she couldn't stop complaining about.
'Obviously,' she told this reporter, 'all birders are masochists.'"

Laura Appelbaum,
Cloverly, MD