Birding

To list or not to list

September 19, 2025 by Catherine Carroll No Comments

I began birding prior to the start of the internet.  I probably shouldn’t admit that, but, well, I just did.  I remember wondering how I was going to keep track of all the birds I saw.  Since I was new to birding, there would be many new birds.  I thought I had my quandary settled when, from somewhere, I purchased Bird Watcher’s Life List & Diary by Bernard A. Fashingbauer, copyright 1989, from Culpepper Press, Inc.  When I pulled it off my bookshelf, I noticed that, on the inside cover, there were three different address labels from three different states I had lived in.

You can see where this would get messy quickly, and it did.  Also, such books become out of date.  I don’t remember which year the Cornell Lab came out with their beta product, eBird.  It was advertised to do all I wanted it to do, and I thought it was great.  But the beta product mode, amongst other things, turned out to be a challenge to enter locations and other data points.  I went back to my book listing and remained, more or less, happy with that until the eBird feathers smoothed out.

I seriously questioned the importance of listing when my work changed in such a way that excessive attention to detail was required to do my job well.  On the weekends, when I went birding, or following a birding trip, documenting all of the birds I had seen had competition with my work documentation.  It became a hassle to spend the time needed to write down and enter all of my bird sightings.  Around this time, I had also begun taking photographs and would spend my time with those.  I was blogging and needed the best photos (of which there were not many) to post on my blog.

In my early birding years, I think listing helped improve my birding skills.  But over time, I had reached a point of diminishing returns even with this.  I also noticed that amongst my listing friends, serious birders, the significant amount of time and obsession they gave to maintaining their lists.  I was impressed, even envious, and came to recognize listing as a healthy activity to satisfy mild-to-moderate OCD.  Because, let’s face it, good birding also requires serious attention to detail, and many good birders have a touch, or more, of OCD.  It’s much more fun and far more healthy than washing your hands all day or checking your door locks over and over.  But I was already putting my OCD to work at my job and needed it there.  I abandoned listing altogether and never looked back.

I had been thinking of writing a blog post for 10,000 Birds about listing.  Thinking about and doing are very different things.  Recently, I was on a relatively long car drive and absolutely tired of the political podcasts in my feed.  I came across This American Life with Ira Glass, episode 831, a rerun from May 24, 2024, titled Lists!!! How they organize the chaos of the world for good and bad.  Starting with Ira Glass’s prologue and followed by three different episodes, it was the listening engagement I needed.  Unfortunately, none of the episodes were about bird listing.  I was surprised about this because birding is famous for its lists and listing.  Even without any mention of bird lists, I still highly recommend the podcast.

Finally, I received the extra shove I needed to write my essay.  I listened to the ABA podcast 09-37, dated September 11, 2025, titled New Art in the New Nat Geo Guide with Andrew Guttenberg.  The host, Nate Swick, often begins each podcast with a prologue, and in this episode, he offers commentary on a new documentary film titled Listers by two non-birding brothers, Owen and Quentin Reiser, who embark upon a lower 48 big year.  It is 1:59 long, so feature length we could say, and currently the brothers are offering it on YouTube for free and, remarkably, commercial-free – a generous bonus when YouTube is involved.  I watched the whole doc in two parts.  It is not your typical narrative-style film, but it is remarkably creative, clever, funny, informative, and, well, borrowing Nate’s description, profane.  I would say mildly profane.  Nate gives the film two thumbs up.  It seemed that he surprised even himself when he liked it.  The Andrew Guttenberg interview is also very good, but is not about listing..

To list, or not to list, this is the question.  While not as existential as Hamlet might have had it, there are all kinds of lists and ways to keep lists. People love lists and love keeping lists.  Especially with bird listing, it’s here to stay – well, it never left – because birders love listing and collecting.  It’s a great way to show your improvement in, for most of us, a hobby that continues to grow exponentially.   eBird is probably the most well-known digital bird documentation site, and it’s now a smooth-running machine.  Worldwide, I know there are other digital documentation sites, but I only have a glancing awareness of these.  

My most recent adventure with listing occurred this past April 2025, when I decided to embark upon an eBird challenge. I never do things like this, but for some reason I decided to try it.  The challenge was to bird the same location twenty times in the month of April and enter an eBird checklist for each visit.  The purpose of this challenge was to monitor and document changes in bird migration as April progressed.  I gave my best effort but failed to achieve the goal.  The required twenty visits proved to be too much, and I was only able to fit in fifteen at my favorite local birding site.  I took a lot of photos, saw a lot of birds, was called out for an incorrect identification, but, as promised, the birds changed significantly as the month progressed.  I have no plans to resume listing, but I will still, and probably always, keep track of the new birds I see.

Cathy Carroll is a native Michigander, the Great Lakes state in the U.S., but became a birder in the Baltimore, Maryland, and Maryland’s Eastern Shore areas (the mid-Atlantic region) in the late 90’s. She was enticed by a birding friend to travel back to Michigan to see the Kirtland’s Warbler for her friend’s life list. She found the whole experience completely riveting and was hooked. Since that first experience, Cathy has seen Kirtland’s Warbler many times, each encounter as delightful as the first.. In 2006, Cathy took the opportunity to take her first birding trip abroad – to Cuba – and she has traveled widely since then. On her recent trip to Finland and Norway, she learned that she was the least well-traveled, by far, birder on the trip. That was a humbling awareness. Her style of birding now is to select a few special birds each year and try to see them. This fuels her ongoing interest in birds and the unrelenting issues that threaten them.
Written by Catherine Carroll
Cathy Carroll is a native Michigander, the Great Lakes state in the U.S., but became a birder in the Baltimore, Maryland, and Maryland’s Eastern Shore areas (the mid-Atlantic region) in the late 90’s. She was enticed by a birding friend to travel back to Michigan to see the Kirtland’s Warbler for her friend’s life list. She found the whole experience completely riveting and was hooked. Since that first experience, Cathy has seen Kirtland’s Warbler many times, each encounter as delightful as the first.. In 2006, Cathy took the opportunity to take her first birding trip abroad – to Cuba – and she has traveled widely since then. On her recent trip to Finland and Norway, she learned that she was the least well-traveled, by far, birder on the trip. That was a humbling awareness. Her style of birding now is to select a few special birds each year and try to see them. This fuels her ongoing interest in birds and the unrelenting issues that threaten them.