Date: 9/12/26 11:33 am From: rtrinkner via Colorado Birds <cobirds...> Subject: [cobirds] Neenoshe flycatchers IDs and some eBird rambling
Hi folks,
The overwhelming ID suggested by COBirders for the three flycatchers I saw this week at Neenoshe Reservoir is Olive-sided Flycatcher. The yellow cast to their bellies suggests that they are first-year birds. Also, the lack of wing bars points away from Ash-throated. I checked Sibley’s illustrations and noted too that Olive-sideds have white edges to their tertials, which is seen in one of my photos.
When I saw the birds in the field, my first ID was Olive-sided Flycatcher. But when I was entering the sighting into the eBird app, and I entered “3” for the tally, the app required a comment due to the “high” number. I second-guessed myself, because the shape of the birds as they clung to the tree in the strong wind was different from that I expect of a less stressed Olive-sided.
I realize that eBird's comment requirement is intended to safeguard against incorrect tally entries, but it can also prevent a birder from entering correct data if the birder interprets the requirement as a you-can’t-possibly-be-correct-and-must-be-a-moron nudge.
Back here in Boulder, I daily see a zillion American Goldfinch at the Boulder Community Gardens, and the eBird app requires a comment when I report more than around 50. I can imagine a birder who tallies over 200 American Goldfinches at the Gardens deciding not to enter them into eBird at all, for fear that they’re making a mistake, which would be a shame as we need all the data about our dwindling bird populations that we can get. I’ve been doing some math to estimate the number of goldfinches at the Gardens, and am realizing that my tallies of 100 or 200 are likely a dramatic underestimate. (There are around 100 individual plots in the Gardens, and during sunflower season most plots have at least 1 goldfinch, and many have 5+…)
I met an experienced birder from Florida the other day at Lagerman Res. She explained that she never entered a sighting into eBird unless she had taken a photo of the bird and run it through Merlin for a confirmation. I appreciate the caution, but I would think that the overall eBird data set would be richer if the birder trusted themselves a bit more. I guess at Neenoshe I should have trusted myself more, too.
Thanks very much to those who responded!
Richard Trinkner
Boulder
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