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Message: <blockquote data-quote="csanchez7" data-source="post: 1668277" data-attributes="member: 64151">This is both shocking and saddening -- that having birds on an ABA list make them somehow more important than the potential of seeing species that are a unique and endemic radiation to the Hawaiian Islands -- or at least, for finding some of the rarest birds on Earth that few others have seen. Hawaii hardly needs an 'Ivory-billed Woodpecker' when half or more of its finches are either extinct or teetering on the brink of extinction.I feel the same as the above listers, but I cringe just as much about people who do state or even county lists -- nothing can be more artificial than the usually straight, arbitrary lines of Miami-Dade that divide the Everglades roughly in half, for example. A lot of people won't look for good birds on the other side of the county line because it is not in their county anymore. I don't keep a county list, but I DO keep location lists for things like Everglades National Park, A.D. Barnes, Key Biscayne, etc.Furthermore, a lot of ABA birders find it more 'respectful' to have gotten all of your year birds within a state or county. A lot of ABA birders like to spend their monetary resources driving around a state for a year chasing down every possible bird -- often birds they are familiar with but want to see only for that year's 'tick' -- rather than using those resources (fuel, car maintenance, tires, etc) to go somewhere with new birds or new or exciting ecosystems (say SE Arizona, Costa Rica, Thailand, etc).To each his own...Carlos</blockquote>

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