Hi Tweets,

John Chandler writes:

>Again the great information on arrival and departure dates, Michael.
>Instead of these tantalizing snippets in reply to specific posts, how about
>letting us have the whole shebang all at once: a post with each migrant
>species' early, average and late arrival and departure dates. I'm sure
>we'd all find it very useful and informative

Money where mouth is, John? You'll get it, then.

Okay, when?

Before I'm finished and had someone with good, knowledgeable judgement
assess the whole thing for accuracy?

Or what I've got done already, uncritiqued? Of course, that would leave me
pretty open, as you know, to the slight of sloppiness which would have
arrived on winged feet. The dates I've offered are provisional, working
dates and open to slight revision as new data arrives.

By the way, John, you're *welcome*, just to remind you of your manners, that
because I believe in the free flow of information I'm even bothering to
share with you and others the patterns I've found in the data, and had the
initiative in the first place to try to uncover them in the face of a
complete and comprehensive lack of interest or support on the side of the
society--the Vancouver (BC) Natural History Society, the leadership of which
you are part. It would be graceful of you to show some appreciation,
perhaps, instead the snide undercut quoted above. I find it fascinating that
even though I was one who did the work, which included figuring out from
first principles *how* to do the work in the first place, that you're
implicitly accusing me of suppression and mockingly challenging me to put up
or shut up. By the way, are you speaking ex officio, or as a private
individual, John? Please make this explicit.

It's pretty time-consuming, working (a full day, with nothing else to do)
these complete-range dates at the rate of about two or three species a day.
The Vancouver BC list is at--what, John?--over three hundred and seventy
species, and nearly all of them show some kind of seasonal variation. Should
I beg, even crave, your patience, John? Or just soldier on? Please advise.

Or maybe, since it's my work, *I* get to decide when and where to publish.
Would that be alright with you and the rest of the VNHS leadership, John?
Gee, just let me know if that's okay with you all, hm?

And there's a legal angle *as you well know*, John. You know--I have told
you--that I had asked George Clulow *many* times for an official
clarification of the VNHS' legal stance on the sighting data that Weber
threatened to sue it over, that was originally 'our' (the memberships')
contribution of bird sightings, the membership who didn't know he was going
to claim it all as a personal asset and threaten a copyright infringement
lawsuit against anyone who used what he then considered 'his' data, only to
be repeatedly fobbed off. If I publish this data as a complete file with
definitive dates, I am *still* unsure that the possibility of a Weber- or
VNHS-inspired lawsuit doesn't hang over me. I can't afford one, grounded as
it would be in the shoddy territoriality of either him or the VNHS.

Good god, possibly getting sued for using sighting data that the many
contributors thought, unawares of what was actually happening, to be in the
public domain. Naive us. Grotesque, but that's how we do things in Vancouver BC.

So please advise, John. Publicly. Officially. Definitively.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net