Watching birds as I do, identifying them to identify with them as I have for most of my sixty years, I’ve counted them for science—a point count census in this habitat or that to determine the number of species there or preferences for grass, tree, or shrub. Sometimes counting birds has been easy, in the case of some rarity—for a snowy owl far south of where it’s supposed to be, I might enumerate on one hand or use a single finger to do the addition. Participation in almost forty years of Christmas bird counts meant tallying both the kinds and numbers of birds seen and heard in a circle of several miles. It was an important thing to do to help understand the annual winter flux of what comes and goes, to get a feel for the population trends of hermit thrushes, bufflehead ducks, white-throated sparrows, and such. . . .