Date: 4/26/24 6:35 am From: Steve Hampton via Tweeters <tweeters...> Subject: Re: [Tweeters] Magnificent Frigatebird
I'm not a reviewer, but I've watched eBird best-practices presentations and
talked to reviewers about how to describe a flagged (rare) bird.
They want a description of what you saw, meaning at least 3 field marks,
vocalizations if any, and the context -- angle, lighting, distance -- how
good of a look you got, etc. Someone should be able to read your
description and guess the species just from your description. Obviously,
even a poor photo or audio is great. Audio can be gotten with a cell phone
pretty easily.
Descriptions such as "Clearly identified" "I know this species" "front
yard" "highlight of the day" "Merlin said" and "yep" don't help the
reviewer evaluate the record.
On Fri, Apr 26, 2024 at 12:14 AM Michael Price via Tweeters <
<tweeters...> wrote:
> 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?
>
> best wishes, m
>
>
>
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