So, too, are Dane County's most Reliable Birders:
Later, the same day:
By the end of day 2, Alenka takes the lead!
There's an irony that's hard to miss. We're told this is conservation, yet it unfolds as a kind of ecological speed-dating — engines idling, checklists multiplying, mileage climbing. It isn't the birds that are being honored here so much as the arithmetic. What's presented as care for the natural world becomes a competitive audit of it, performed mostly, time-wise, from behind a windshield. One begins to suspect that restraint — the one quality conservation actually requires — has quietly left the scene.