Hello, birders,

I have been following with great interest the thread about ABA, especially
since I know many of you who posted comments. Perhaps some of you know that
I was elected to the ABA Board of Directors at the Tucson Convention in July
2005. All of the topics that showed up in this thread also come up at the
board meetings. As near as I can tell, all 15 board members are listers,
some more fanatic than others. There is the same diversity of opinion on the
board (drawn from 11 states and 2 provinces) as expressed in this thread.
Norm Saunders got it right when he wrote “I can sympathize with the Board of
Directors.…no matter what they do they get criticized.”

The contents of "Birding" is a whole discussion in itself. Ted Floyd is open
to suggestions, although as you can imagine, the contents for the remainder
of this year are largely set. The magazine does try to meet the interests of
all its members, and we are a pretty diverse lot. You will be seeing some
short “content” questionnaires (pull-out postcards) in future issues. Fill
them out and send them in; they will be read and acted on.

Rick Sussman pointed out that “Wild Bird” was a good magazine, but “now
seems to reprint entire issues yearly, with very little new info.” That is
what would happen to “Birding” if it stuck to identification articles. I
remember great ID articles over the years, but much of that information has
been incorporated into the new field guides, especially David Sibley’s set,
and into books like Kenn Kaufman’s “Advanced Birding”. The ABA website has a
complete index, for those who have access to back issues (I got 145 hits to
the query bird identification). Parts of recent issues are available in .pdf
format, but it will take a long time to put up back issues. Suggesting that
ID articles be put up first would be a great idea.

This thread started over a mislabeled bird in a tour brochure printed by an
outside tour company. Bill Maynard spotted the problem, but too late to
change it before the mailing went out. There are a couple of points here,
covering revenue to ABA, international bird travel (by both birds and
birders), and conservation of bird habitat. To start with the last point, we
all know--no habitat, no birds. Protecting bird habitat is part of our
mission (see ABA's website), and it costs money. ABA-sponsored tours provide
revenue to do some of its conservation work, which as far as I know, is
restricted to the New World. I want ABA to help protect habitat for birds,
especially in Latin America where so many of "our" birds migrate and winter.
Giving our extra/old equipment to Birder's Exchange (BEX) is easy, recycles
equipment, and provides needed tools to others. BEX's project to translate
"The Neotropical Companion" into Spanish will get good information into the
right hands. I think it is especially impressive that 35 Latinos from all
over Mexico, Central America, and South America (excluding Brazil, where
Portuguese is spoken) have volunteered to help translate. Their pictures and
bios are on the ABA website.

This brings me to the 2005 ABA membership survey. Norm is right to be wary
of other people’s interpretations. I have just spent the last six months
re-analyzing the survey. It was poorly designed, the presentation of the
data was awful, and the analysis by the group that ran the survey was
shallow. I spent a lot of time measuring crude bar graphs to retrieve the
numbers and then resorted the data into graphs that would tell us something
meaningful. I am particularly interested in how "new" members differ from
long-term members. Due to the constraints of the survey design, what I found
were trends, not strong shifts, and most of them made common sense. As you
can guess, I plan to have input on the design, especially the wording of the
questions, for the next survey.

Constructive comments are always welcome, cheers, Erika ()