identifying a female Cape May warbler visually, this judgment later confirmed by shooting the bird. Griscom's and his talent led the science away from using shotguns to using binoculars. Whether or not the story of the warbler is entirely true, Griscom was indeed skilled at quickly identifying birds by sight, using diagnostic features first learned from his museum work, and he influenced other birders and ornithologists to use the same techniques. Later in his career, he wrote, [What] people are now able to do in the way of instantly recognizing a large number of birds by song, notes, tricks of flight, shape, etc, entirely apart from their colors, seems perfectly fabulous to the uninitiated and was flatly declared to be impossible a generation ago.... The battle for sight records and field identification of the living bird has been won, so far as I know, and there is no real quarrel left about what birds can be recognized alive and when this recognition can be used in scientific research. This is not to say that Griscom never collected specimens, as he certainly did so on his Latin American expeditions. In the U.S., he estimated that he collected one bird per year between 1928 and 1945, and he held a permit for scientific collecting until 1955. Nor did Griscom accept sight records uncritically, viewing himself as a moderate in this respect. While he encouraged amateurs to pursue birding as a sport, he considered many nonprofessionals' published accounts of sightings to be so much clutter in the scientific literature. In his Birds of the New York City Region (1923), he used only those sight records that he considered reliable, and he made the fine distinction between merely reporting an observation and accepting it as a record. Ludlow Griscom is best remembered, however, for his eager participation in and promotion of the rising practice of birding by eye and ear, of watching birds as a sport. His first Christmas Bird Count was in 1908, and he organized counts in the Boston area. He kept personal life and year lists: his North America species total through 1939 was 640. But his particular passion was for Big Days, a friendly competition in which a team of birders traverses a region, intending to find and identify as many bird species as possible in a 24-hour period. An excellent one-day count for Griscom in coastal Massachusetts was 160