Birds?!

This article can be found at http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2010/09/26/bird_sightings/
   
    Today the latest Massachusetts bird sightings report was released in the Boston Globe. The report is basically a list—a list of tons of different kinds of birds, some very obscure. There is not much of a lead. The report does not start off with the most staggering number of a certain kind of bird (“2,500 black-bellied plovers”) nor does it begin with the bird with the funniest name (“two dickcissels”); instead, the lead is simply the fact that one bird has apparently gone missing for a week: “An immature gull-billed tern at Sandy Point State Park on Plum Island has not been reported since Monday.” That’s the first sentence—quite the hook! Where ever did that immature tern go??
    Who reads these anyway? Are they the same people who call the Massachusetts Audubon Society in the first place with bird sightings? Like it’s some sort of scavenger hunt for birds. Imagine them calling the Audubon Society, ‘Yes, I went to South Beach to find the 18 shearwaters reported last week, and instead I found 21 shearwaters. I also spotted 7 warblers, an ovenbird, and 17,000 dickcissels! So you can tell those reporters in Nahant to suck it!’
    Maybe there is this extremely small, specialized community of bird watchers who run around Massachusetts on weekends in search of birds like the birds were a dying species of dinosaur. They would ooh and ahh at the winged creatures like small children getting excited over bubbles. And they would always have their notebook so they could count exactly how many of each kind of bird there was. Because this is clearly information that people should know about.