I saw this article go viral among the circle of my birding friends, and I had mixed reactions. Ironically, I had just written a blog post the day prior about the role that listing plays in my birding practice, and how/why I’m driven by my life list. While I “get” the structure of the piece, but I was most gripped by the 2nd part about the historical (and underrepresented) role of women in ornithology. For instance, Gentile highlights Florence Merriam, who was a predecessor to Roger Tory Peterson but has largely been lost to obscurity. It comes as no surprise that a woman’s proclamation that birds could be reliably identified by field marks would be laughed off, while decades later the same idea was promoted by a man whose name continues to enjoy much fame among naturalists. Similarly, the role of women in the founding of the Audubon Society has been somewhat downplayed, so it was great to see the story brought to light.
Then, the somewhat troublesome slant on listing comes back, which is ironic to me because Gentile wrote the book Life List about a woman who at the time held the global life list record!
“Having abandoned competitive collecting, men invented and spread the gospel of competitive listing — the practice of tracking the number of species you’ve seen and trying to outdo your friends.” – Olivia Gentile
Was this truly the work and motivation of only men? Were the thousands of women reported lines above not keeping track of the species they’d seen? I also appreciate her highlighting of the ongoing struggle of women in academia (Schroeder et al. 2013). Luckily, the tides in ecology professorship appear to be changing as of late.
p. 910 Ornithology: Foundation, Analysis, and Application. Morrison et al. 2018