Date: 4/26/24 12:17 am From: Michael Price via Tweeters <tweeters...> Subject: Re: [Tweeters] Magnificent Frigatebird
Hi tweets
This issue of acceptance/rejection of extraordinary rarity reports has
always been a fraught one, leading to frustration on either side of the
rarities committee: on one side, irritation with undocumented, possibly
frivolous reports; on the other, frustration and resentment at sometimes
haughty and insensitively bureaucratic committee dismissal. It doesn't
have to be this way. There is a simple workaround: the 'pending' file.
This category ensures that potentially valid
migrational/dispersion/trending data are not lost.
Longer ago than I care to think, I operated a Rare Bird Alert for five
years, and I became suspicious of a connection between a cluster of
undocumented reports of subtropical vagrants in the Greater Vancouver
region and BC generally and a then-occurring El Nińo episode. Lacking
documentation, none of them could be accepted under then-current committee
acceptance protocols at either the metro or the provincial committees. The
same lack of flexibility existed in many US and Canadian committees. The
result? data lost.
Well, we now know that many of these tropical and subtropical rarities
which heat up our alerts are climate refugees, whether displaced by global
heating or cyclical atmospheric phenomena such as El Nińo. But how much of
the early warnings were lost for want of a 'pending' category in our
rarities committees?
