Hi Tweets,

Gene Hunn writes:

>It's not so much who saw/reported the bird, but the fact that those with
>reputations as experts are most likely to have provided exactly the details
>one would hope everyone would provide for extraordinary sightings. The
>expert reputation is built on years of providing such careful documentation
>and demonstrating a critical attitude toward one's own observations. Once
>one achieves "expert" status one should not, of course, abandon those good
>habits.

Who decides to award 'expert' status? Who inducts the individual into the
'expert' lodge? Who establishes the benchmarks and how?

Reading the above over a few times made me realise there's a difference
between expert status (your level of acceptance within the community of
other experts who decide whether you're an expert, too) and expertise (how
much and how well you know your stuff). We assume they're synonymous. Most
often it turns out they are. Where the goalposts are and whether they shift
around depends on the internal political health of the organisation and
whatever consensus it fosters.

While practising documentation skills consistently is usually the best way
to develop a critical attitude, and is necessary to gain expert status, and
most importantly renders your ID open to testing, it isn't the only road to
gaining expertise. Locally, there are a couple of old-time birders I would
not hesitate to call expert based on their empirically-gained knowledge,
their acute observational skills, and keen intelligence to integrate what
they see with what they already know, who have never dipped pen in ink to
write down a description or rarity report or even to 'keep records' as we
birders usually use the term. Yet they are as well-prepared for an
'extraordinary sighting' as any expert (one showed me my lifer King Eider
(Somateria spectabilis) he'd found, a properly-sexed female along Stanley
Park's seawall, and, boy, are eiders ever scarce here), though less likely
to be taken seriously in reporting it. Rarity, schmarity, they'd say.

Personally, I think if one doesn't write it down, it's a waste of good
expertise; ya can't take it with ya. And I believe, with Gene, that if you
do become an expert--whatever that term comes to mean; it's slipperier than
it seems at first glance--it's absolutely necessary to avoid letting your
expert status begin to do the work of establishing ID's for you instead the
quality of your documentation doing so. I speak from personal experience
that it's happened (I'm shocked, simply shocked '-) that reputation as an
expert has led to acceptance of rarity reports so incomplete and perfunctory
that if they came from people outside the elite they'd get the well-deserved
boot into the 'rejected: insufficient details' bin.

Michael Price A brave world, Sir,
Vancouver BC Canada full of religion, knavery and change;
mprice at mindlink.net we shall shortly see better days.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)