I’m a little floored by your observation that your subjects generally don’t think about migratory birds outside of their local and transitory context. That particular consideration seems so basic to me that it hadn’t even occurred to me that others don’t think of it. Though it might go some way towards explaining the uncritical fascination with vagrant birds — the keenness to add a particular rarity to a local list seeming to overwhelm the reality that the bird in question is lost and probably S.O.L.

I wonder if birders in other parts of the world have the same localized focus. You should get a grant for a few months’ interviewing in the UK, Portugal, and Taiwan to figure that one out.