Many thanks for all these details, Jim.
My criteria for keeping my own personal yard list are definitely my own. I
want to know which birds are using the habitat I provide, not every bird
that might pass through the general area.
When I'm listing for ebird or whatever, I do make note of every bird I
see/hear, however distant. It's interesting, though, that Cornell encourage
us to count every bird, even when it's highly likely to be a repeat. My
tendency in those circumstances has been to count the minimum number of
birds rather than the maximum, because I have indeed been worried about
over-counting. Certainly on the CBCs I've been on, I've been encouraged to
count that way to avoid over-counting.
Does anyone know of there are specific criteria for CBCs that differ from
those of Cornell?
Louise Rutter
Kirkland
On Sun, Jan 26, 2025 at 12:24 PM via Tweeters <
tweeters at u.washington.edu>
wrote:
>
Louise,
>
>
Back when I was first starting to use eBird I asked this specific
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question
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about my checklists. Specifically - "when do you report (count) a bird?"
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and gave the example of my backyard feeder and the fact that I could
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see birds coming and going ... but suspected - highly - that some/many
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of them were 'repeats' and had been there as short a time ago as only a
>
few minutes.
>
>
The answer I got was "if you don't know for certain it is the same bird -
>
count it". So even if you have a group of say 10 finches that are coming
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and going from your yard/feeder - the advice is to count them "every time
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you see them that you, personally, can't say it is the same bird".
>
This advice is not just about birds in our backyards. And Cornell
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doesn't consider it "over counting" (probably because you will also
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miss many birds that might visit your backyard when you do something
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as seemingly insignificant as just getting another cup of coffee).
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There are similar considerations for 2 or more people all seeing and
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reporting the -same- bird ... perhaps even birding together.
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>
So here is my take/interpretation of this advice. As long as everyone is
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using pretty much the same methods - it doesn't matter ... because
>
what the science is about is the changes - over time and even over
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relatively long periods of time. Such as from one season to the next or
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one year to the next or one decade to the next.
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We all know about events such as "irruptions" and "long term trends"
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etc.
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===> If we have lots of data (reports) then it all averages out in ways
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that wouldn't be true for just a few reports (total number of
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checklist).
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But there -are- lots of checklists being done in all kinds of situations.
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So report what you can ID and let the citizen science work out what it
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means. Even reports such as "Gull, species" are valuable/useful -
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especially when compared to no reports at all?
>
>
- Jim in Skagit
>
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