Why do bird watchers wear hats?

Why do bird watchers wear hats?

OCT 05
Why do bird watchers wear hats?
Think about it for a minute. Even city birders wear caps or hats most of the time when they are birdwatching.  I started wearing a cap when I found myself tromping through a trackless area and walked right into a WOLF SPIDER nest.  That was enough of a lesson for me.
Never walk faster than you can see. And never walk forward when you are looking UP.
Nobody teaches you that in a bird guide. Or in school. Only life experience of dozens of baby spiders scrambling for safety as fast as I was scrambling for safety will teach lessons like that.
The other reason I wear a cap, usually a baseball hat, while birding or hiking is because I grew up in an area where ticks were abundant. I know they could find their way to me but that one little layer seemed to be enough to deter them, I thought. Let them feast on someone else. It seemed to work. Through the years I only actually had a few ticks ON me and I managed to find each of them before they got comfortable and started feeding on me.
I asked another birder, who was a lawyer at his day job, why do YOU wear a baseball cap when you are birding? You don’t wear one at other times.
Well he gave me two reasons.  One was simple. It was fun. Like putting on “the happy play day face”, you put on your suit to go to work and your fun hat to go birding.  The other was pure logic. Well, he said. Birds fly. And usually when they leave the branches to get airborne they relieve themselves and lighten the load- so to speak. He did not want bird splat on his head. He would rather have it on his hat.
I can’t say that I blame him. When we went birdwatching at a Great Blue Heron rookery (a colony where they nest) we all agreed that hats were essential gear for exploring near these big birds.  One fellow had a Tee shirt with a field guide to identify bird tracks and suggested we create on that would identify bird “splats”.  Believe it or not, someone did as you can see below.

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