[obol] Slaty-backed is 14 year old OBOL mascot!

[Greg Gillson]

March 1993. Oregon's first Slaty-backed Gull, discovered on the previous 
year's CBC, is still present. Six Oregon birders email each other about this 
and other rare birds in Oregon: Rich Hoyer, Skip Russell, Bob O'Brien, 
Marshall Beretta, Tony Mendoza, and Greg Gillson, who coins the word Oregon 
Birders On-Line for the group email ("online," as a non-hyphenated word, 
wasn't in popular usage yet).

November 1993. A Tricolored Heron and Scissor-tailed Flycatcher appear in 
the Newport area. This becomes an OBOL event and nearly all of OBOL's 60 
members meet there during one weekend, many meeting in person for the first 
time.

March 1994. Gillson personally relays all messages between members until 
sometime in spring 1994, when Hoyer creates the OBOL list on the OSU server 
and becomes list owner. Membership reaches 150.

1997. Dan Owens takes over list owner responsibilities at OSU. OBOL has 350 
members.

March 2007. There are over 1,000 OBOL members plus many times that number of 
interested birders who read the postings on Siler's web site.

...

I think I can speak for all the original members that we never imagined OBOL 
would become what it is today. For one thing, "birder" and "birding" itself 
have changed meaning. Birding, as the leading bird magazine of the day with 
the same name, was all about listing, big days, chasing rare birds, 
leading-edge ID, status, distribution, field ornithology. Kenn Kaufman was 
the young birder's hero of the later quarter of the 20th century--as a 
hot-shot teenaged birder he dropped out of high school to hitch-hike across 
North America several times, slept on park benches, and ate dog food to save 
money. In the process he amassed one of the highest single-year bird lists 
in North America. Though he's reformed (assimilated?) now, at the time I am 
sure he would have choked like the rest of us of that era on the aesthetic 
appreciation, conservation, birder ethics, and other topics and sentiments 
that makes up a large part of the OBOL community discussions today.

So, though discussing the minutiae of plumage features of Slaty-backed or 
hybrid gulls might seem to be an irritating subculture on OBOL, you can see 
that it is, in fact, the very foundation of OBOL.

Greg Gillson
The Bird Guide, Inc.
greg at thebirdguide.com
http://thebirdguide.com