Do people include ringed birds on their lists? It seems to me that some might consider it cheating.
Personally I have no issue with ticking a bird in the hand as long as it was caught in the wild and will be released back into the wild thus making is still a wild bird and not retained in a zoo, aviary etc.
Should you not count a bird beause you used optics to look at it and not used pure naked eye only ?. There are different ways to see wild birds and a bird caught in a mist net and then shown afterwards before release is not a problem.
I'm not sure I agree that a "bird in the hand" becomes "captive". It's still a wild bird, the same way a bird at your feeder is a wild bird. If you catch a butterfly in a net, does it become "captive"?
It's not that they're captive (or not, depending on one's definition thereof); it's that it completely removes the whole point of what I think birding is about - the pursuit and identification of the "quarry". The bird has to have (I hate to use the shooting metaphor, but can't think of any other) a sporting chance of "getting away" or I feel like I haven't actually accomplished anything - might as well have gone and looked at one in the zoo. Or a stuffed one at the museum.
Anyone can count whatever they like. But birds in the hand are rarely counted by birders in the USA. I thought the reason was fairly obvious--a bird in the hand is no longer wild--it is a captive bird. I'd no more count a bird in the hand or a mist net than I would count a bird in a zoo. Now as to whether/when you can count it after it's been released, that's a more complicated question the ABA rules try to address, but I'm not going to try to elucidate all the complications here.
A bird made temporarily captive for the purpose of ringing or other study and subsequently released is captive but not domestic. Once it is released it is completely wild again (wild....absolutely livid!)