Okay.  That makes sense.  I don't mind that people think I'm a bit nuts.  They're probably right!  I just dislike having the whole group of us referred to as liars.  I withdraw my "grump".

Emily D. Joyce
Crownsville, MD 21032

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Laura M. Appelbaum 
  To:  
  Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 12:43 AM
  Subject: [MDOSPREY] Lilypons "Birders Lie" Article


  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