Sean Dooley

It's repetition makes you proficient at the language.

You can do a weekly class or you can do your Duolingo or something.

But if you're not doing it all the time, it just drops out of your mind.

But when you're immersed in that language, say if you go to the country you've learnt it, you'll find that moment where you realise that you're, I guess, thinking in that language.

And I think there is a point in birding where you're thinking in birding language.

Yeah.

And I'd just add to that, Kirsty, that the best birders I know, the ones that I bow down to as experts, they are the people that are still curious and still questioning.

And they're the ones that when you're out with a bunch of gun birders, you will get the ones that they just want to be the first to identify it to kind of prove something.

Oh, yeah, you know, I got that first.

And they sometimes scoff at people who know vastly more than them because they'll actually say, oh, what's this?

It could be this or it could be that.

And it's because they're truth seekers.

They actually really want to know.

And it's not about the ego of saying I'm the best.

And that's always been in my experience.

The birders that I've admired the most are the ones that every time you're out there, they're totally open to being wrong and totally open to learning something new.

Oh, yeah, undoubtedly.

It's a well-known phenomena.

And I think somebody's even written a pseudoscientific paper about it.

But my theory is that birds are morally judgy.