You had to make the effort to have the luck. - Kenn Kaufman

The list total isn’t important, but the birds themselves are important. Every bird you see. So the list is just a frivolous incentive for birding, but the birding itself is worthwhile. It’s like a trip where the destination doesn’t have any significance except for the fact that it makes you travel. The journey is what counts.

We were talking about the insulation of human experience. We live enclosed in artificial structures with controlled climates, synthetic food, and purified water. No wonder our glimpses of the real world come as a shock.

It did not matter to me what country I was in. Bird-list regions, like political regions, were just human inventions. The birds were wonderful, regardless of where you saw them. It was silly, I told myself, to be preoccupied with how a bird’s location was relative to some artificial boundary.