Subject: Re: May-August is dull. ???etc.
Date: Jun 1 14:44:06 1995
From: Peter Rauch - peterr at violet.berkeley.edu


>Date: Thu, 1 Jun 1995 13:54:21 -0800
>From: dpaulson at ups.edu (Dennis Paulson)

>[Maybe what Byron]
>meant is that a single such record is meaningless,
> It's only when such records occur in some numbers that meaning
>emerges.

Perhaps a single record _is_ meaningless ornithologically, but on the
other hand, I'd say "it depends." It depends on what the questions
are. If, for example, one is ever to have a second record, then a first
[only, meaningless?] record must be recorded first. If, for example, we
were to ask questions about how many individual birds of a species must
arrive at a new, barren Hawaii or Galapagos to speciate into all those
marvelous variations, then having records, however disparate the
species, of out-of-range individuals has some value (e.g., it might
indicate the propensity for some species to occasionally go far out of
range, other rarely ever, other "never", ...).

One of the problems in _counting_ out-of-range incidents is that we forget
to count the observations we've made, rather than just the positive
incidents; if I go out to a particular area repeatedly and "observe" that
I see no X-us y-us, but one time I see an X-us y-us, have I observed
once or many times? Does the answer to this question make any difference
in the value of that one positive record?

But, again, like I just said earlier today, I've got a cellar full of
stuff that might be useful someday....
Peter