Hi, tweeters.

I've been working for some time on a spreadsheet originally compiled by Phil Mattocks. This spreadsheet will contain all the bird records the Washington Bird Records Committee has ever considered, both accepted and not accepted, and we will be putting it on the WOS website when it is finally up to date. It's one of those "world's most unpleasant jobs" you see in the TV programs, as keeping up with the records is a gargantuan task, even with the good work done by Phil and Doug Schonewald, the two WBRC secretaries over the years, and the other committee members.

One of the things I'm finding is that too many of the records stored in our files end up without a date, even though the date of course was known at the time of the sighting. Among other reasons, I think this is because descriptions of rare birds are often taken verbatim from tweeters, and the person writes "today I saw a Blue-tailed Tweetiebird at Marymoor." The original e-mail has the date on it, but the text doesn't mention it. I would like to make a plea for all to include the date(s) of observations in the text of your messages, to avoid this problem.

Secondly, we often check photos in online photo collections as documentation for records. It's also frustrating to get to such a photo and find no date, even in some cases no locality given with it. I think all the photo-displaying websites have provisions for including titles or captions with photos, and it would be wonderful if a locality and a date would accompany each photo or group of photos. This is true for common as well as rare birds. To me, it makes it a richer experience to know where and when a bird was photographed when I look at a beautiful photo of it.

Thanks!

Dennis
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Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382
dennispaulson at comcast.net