Date: 6/14/26 6:26 am From: Kent Fiala (via carolinabirds Mailing List) <carolinabirds...> Subject: Re: Garganey and the Demise of the Listserve
Remembrance of the time */before Carolinabirds/*. I posted this on Facebook several years ago.
I was out at Ebenezer Point this morning, and my mind turned back to Dec 10, 1994, when I was there to see what was then a Marbled Murrelet, later Long-billed Murrelet (the only lifer I've ever gotten on my birthday!). And I got to thinking, how did we ever bird back then? How did people find out about this bird? How did I find out about it? Eventually I think I've recovered a memory that I was tipped off by a personal email from Will Cook. All of the people who saw it must have benefited by such direct personal contacts.
The bird was discovered by Ricky Davis on the 9th, and four people whom he contacted got out to see it. The next day (10th) over 30 people were reported to have seen it, and a few more got in on the single brief sighting on the 11th.
I think this was just about on the cusp of the time when lots of people were getting on the Internet. Probably a lot of birders did not have email yet. I believe that I personally had not yet heard of the World Wide Web. Carolinabirds was two years in the future. Widespread use of mobile internet was around a decade and a half in the future. I think most people did not even have cell phones. It was also a number of years before you could check distances on Google maps, or navigate with GPS.
The Carolina Bird Club was running a Rare Bird Alert recorded message (maintained by Taylor Piephoff and transcribed by me for a national rare bird alert listserv) that you could call and listen to, but I don't know how many people called every day. If there was an update on the 9th or 10th, I missed transcribing it; I got a Dec 11th transcript out after the last sighting of the bird.
