Dennis Paulson wrote

>In response to several postings, I'll add the following to what I wrote on
>this subject previously.
>
>One of the things we discuss repeatedly in our Washington Bird Records
>Committee meetings is the difficulty of monitoring bird observations on a
>local scale. With the increase in interest in birding has come a huge
>number of reports of species just a bit (or more than a bit) unlikely at
>that place or that time. Unquestionably, some of them are valid records,
>but which? Often they are submitted by people with whom various compilers
>are unfamiliar, and reputation, for better or worse, does count for
>something.
>
>Because of limitations of time or energy, many of these reports are never
>put under close scrutiny, and, even among the experts, there's a lot of
>disagreement about whether such reports should be (a) included in the
>record (and published) as such without such scrutiny, (b) judged just as
>critically as a new state record would be judged, with the accompanying
>reliance on photos, detailed written descriptions, corroboration by more
>than one observer, etc.; or (c) ignored for lack of further supporting
>evidence. Unfortunately, no such decisions have been made, so reports such
>as the recently mentioned boreal chickadee and grasshopper sparrow remain
>in limbo. It actually boils down to how liberal or conservative (read
>"easy-going or hard-assed") a given record compiler is, I think!
>

Situations where controversy reigns involve identifying species by song. I
know birders with "decades of field experience" who can't tell the
difference between the songs of Yellow Warblers and Wilson's Warblers, but
are doing Roadside Breeding Bird Surveys. Some of these same people also
identify birds slightly-out-of-range or -season by voice alone.

--Jerry Tangren
<tangren at wsu.edu>