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Bird Watching 
By HARRY SMITH 
IN HIS EXCELLENT book, A Guide to Bird Watching, Joseph Hickey says, 
“The art of bird watching has different meanings among different people.” 
And referring to the “Field Card School of Ornithology which measures 
success in terms of rarity, the first migrant, and the big list,” he says: “At 
its worst, it is a mad rush to the next oasis, with birds ticked off on the 
run, and a great reliance placed on both gasoline and brakes. .. . Bird 
watching is much more than this. It is the art of discovering how birds 
live.” 
Many amateur bird students will argue that they are not qualified by 
training for serious observation of birds or that they record them only as 
a hobby and that more thoughtful study would detract from the fun of 
building the big list with emphasis on the rarer species. These arguments 
are well answered by the study of the nesting yellow warblers by Lee 
Johnson in this issue of the Bulletin. 
Lee is a 17 year old high school boy with no scientific training. He has, 
however, done a fine job of bird watching and is to be commended for his 
notes on it. Furthermore, we know he had all the fun and satisfaction from 
the results of his project that he had in recording more than 200 species 
last year. 
As he mentioned in the last paragraph, it would be interesting to see 
what could be accomplished by the cooperative efforts of four or five ob- 
servers, and we recommend such a project for the consideration of the 
Rockford club. If the study were confined to cowbird parasitism alone, it 
might well make a worth while contribution to the literature on the sub- 
ject. 
The Evanston Bird club has a similar opportunity for a cooperative 
study of the upland plover in the area where Mrs. Dorothy Helmer 
watched it and reported her observations in the March, 1949, issue of the 
Bulletin. In most of the densely populated centers of the nation bird students 
would go many miles to see this interesting bird, and yet it nests little 
more than a five-minute drive from any part of Evanston. However, at the 
rate new houses are being built in this area, the last nesting site of the 
plover will be gone in another year or two. It is, therefore, imperative that 
any additional nesting observations be made soon. 
For downstate studies we could suggest the Bewick’s wren, which we 
understand is extending its range northward. Northern Illinois readers of 
the Bulletin would be interested in reading of this little wren which is un- 
common in their section of the state. Here is a project for the Champaign 
or Springfield clubs, and a more southerly nesting species could be selected 
for study by the East St. Louis club. 
These suggestions, which are only a few of many others that occur to 
us, are not made as a plea to abandon the field check card, but that it be 
made a subordinate, rather than a major, interest in watching birds. Even 
the most serious cases of check list fever abate the first week in June, when 
