Come off it, Chris. As a birder, I accepted that I was as guilty as anyone else of contributing to the proliferation of excessive and unnecessary air travel. Every passenger (businessman, tourist, birder...) can smugly look across the aisle and reassure themselves of their innocence – the flight would have gone anyway, carrying all these other folk on far less important missions.
But similarly, why do birders still 'need' to travel thousands of kilometres just to personally see/hear (ie, 'tick') species that can often be easily experienced via a wide range of online media?