what is a life list?
a life list is a list birdwatchers keep of every species of bird we've seen in our life! this includes birds we got visual or auditory evidence of, or ones that we just saw and don't have any "proof" of! birds are notoriously flighty (ha) and can often be hard to capture image or audio of, so birdwatchers generally just trust what others say they saw, and, well, there's not much benefit to lying about something like this. :P