Hello from a flatlander, VT resident wannabe -

I've heard that the way people who count large (waterfowl, etc) birds via
aerial surveys learn to do
accurate counts by taking a handful of uncooked rice and throwing  it on a
table then estimating, then counting,
the grains. By doing this repeatedly one eventually gets more accurate. Or
not. Or never cooks rice again.
Maybe a scam by the rice lobby . . .

On a personal note, I found as I became seriously interested in birding that
I already had the ability
to accurately estimate numbers, because I'm a microbiologist and in graduate
school I started each
day looking at 200-300 Petri dishes of bacteria for my thesis project and
unconsciously developed
a very good knack for estimating numbers. One never knows when these
seemingly useless skills
will come into play . . .

Anthony
S. Hadley, MA


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