Perhaps my Big Year attempt had no value in itself, but it had led me to incredible places, a whole series of extraordinary destinations. It had take… - Kenn Kaufman

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.

Birds are real. If I had to justify extreme birding, that would be my first defense. Even as we dash around in a mad quest for the biggest list of bird sightings, we are keenly attuned to reality—not just the birds but also geography, weather patterns, forest types, tide schedules, and myriad other factors, because everything in nature is connected. Other people may take up hobbies to escape reality, but birding has the opposite draw. It’s a deep dive into the real world.

One thing was becoming obvious to me now: list-chasing was not the best way to learn birds. It had been a good way to start, an incentive for getting to a lot of places and seeing a lot of species. But the lure of running up a big list made it all too tempting to simply check off a bird and run on to the next, without taking time to really get to know them.