John Morgan
Well-known member
You will also need this URL:
http://www.guidebaguage.sitew.fr/#Contenu.B
and changing to C,to D and to E in the URL will get you the rest of the pages
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French ageing guides (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Jamie Dunning
- Start date
You will also need this URL:
http://www.guidebaguage.sitew.fr/#Contenu.B
and changing to C,to D and to E in the URL will get you the rest of the pages
citrinella
Well-known member
Didn't he ? what do you think he meant by "the green identification guide to european passerines" ? While Jamie clarified that he was not using it for ringing he made no suggestion that he was not referring to Svenson.
That is a clever use of words, but I don't agree at all. I interpret that as meaning we should apply the highest possible scientific standards - sticking to the protocol. I can see that non-scientists will find that wording ambiguous, which is a pity.
The BTO does dictate the protocol for the ringing scheme. It does decide what techniques are used, and when. This is entirely reasonable as I said before because otherwise no-one would know what techniques had been used or when in what parts of the database. The fact that a technique has been published in a peer reviewed journal, even if a variation on an existing technique, does not make it "correct", let alone part of the protocol. On the matter of correctness alone, consider this : medical practitioners had been diligently reading up all the latest scientific papers in the peer reviewed journals and implementing the treatments and techniques which appeared to work well for decades. A guy called Archie Cochrane looked at this and said (my words) "Hang on - this doesn't work". He demonstrated that these papers could often be wrong due to chance. The data used for the paper would have supported the conclusions drawn, but due to random variation those conclusions were not a good representation of what happens more generally. The results presented could also be an incomplete representation of what happens, for instance if a sound study found that the same treatment was inneffective it would almost certainly be rejected by journals, not because the study was wrong, but just because it was uninteresting. As a result of his work there is now an international network of teams of specialist researchers doing "Cochrane reviews" on all the published and accessible unpublished studies on each particular question. They review first the quality of the study, where suitable they agglomerate the results of all studies to produce a "best answer we have". The results have staggered the medical profession. I cannot remember the details, but one of the earliest reviews looked at the treatment of a major heart condition and found that the "gold standard" treatment, which had been used and highly regarded for years, was killing more patients than it helped.
By comparison with medicine, we have a tiny amount of research into any particular question in ornithology. In that light it is essential to be conservative in application of new papers, especially as very few authors have access to much data. Another response seen in medical research has been to move from studies based on hundreds of patients seen by a particular researcher (and immediate colleagues) to multicentre international trials involving tens of thousands of patients from much more diverse situations - to increase reliability of the results.
The Ringers' manual does not mandate use of techniques published in Ringing news or even Ringing & Migration, as quoted above it refers to the Ringers' Bulletin, please be careful
Absolutely ! This applies to all publications (more below) and is why the BTO specifies that we should make changes published in Ringers' Bulletin which they do control and use as the one and only source of changes to the ringing scheme protocol.
See above on all this. These are not "superior standards" as they will degrade application of the protocol (even if "correct"). If you cannot accept this, then we should agree to disagree.
OK, good point but many of these papers appear to be authored by ringers talking about birds they have handled. I am not sure how many, as I do not have a full list of ringers !
Hmm - while I was working in medical research new rules were introduced on authorship which specified a fair degree of involvement in the production of a paper. As for C.P.Bell's paper, while we may not like the conclusions, and may consider the methodology flawed, it is perfectly possible that the BTO author was well involved, but failed to detect methodological issues - after all the journal and peer reviewers did not reject the paper.
Incidentally, if the Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists Union, can publish this article which you so explicitly regard as "flawed" why should you assume all publications in ornithological journals on ageing birds in the hand are "correct" ?
Mike.
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AlfArbuthnot
Well-known member
You really are over-interpretting all this! If you think the current ringing scheme is of the highest scientific standards, then you haven't looked at what it produces. The majority of ringing is non-standardised, ad-hoc 'general' ringing, which produces data that does not easily fit into any analytical design. If ringers were all sticking to the highest possible scientific standards, then they'd all be doing RAS and CES. So year on year, another million birds are ringed, and the data mountain piles up, and much of it is never analysed. Contrast that with some other national ringing schemes, which it is purely project-led - no project, no ringing. THAT is the highest standards and protocols.
I wont revisit your points about BTO being judge and jury, except to say that it's clearly not the case because of where the expertise lies. The BTO are basically just another avenue for information dissemination. If you age a bird according to a method not 'endorsed' by BTO then there is no comeback. The BTO accepts whatever you give, and they have their own internal checks according to their own parameters (many automated in IPMR), but which still allow for plenty of errors.
The Ringers' manual does not mandate use of techniques published in Ringing news or even Ringing & Migration, as quoted above it refers to the Ringers' Bulletin, please be careful
Ringers' Bulletin ended some years ago, and was replaced by Ringing News. Please keep up!
Not sure what your point is here. Anyone who rings birds in UK is compelled by law to pay money to the BTO for their permit. But a hell of a lot of ringing goes on in Britain, in the BTO scheme, that does not need the BTO and for which the whole ringing scheme set-up may be a costly inconvenience, and for which the BTO's database and protocols are irrelevant.
For example, if you are in a university and want to do a project on species x, you need a BTO permit, and to pay them £30 per year, plus extra for colour-ringing. You then have to give them your data, out of your own research time and funding. For 'hobby ringers' this can be useful, as they like to know about controls and the BTO tells them how to collect their data so that it suits the BTO. But 'academic ringers' don't need the BTO for this. They probably don't care about controls, because they're non-standardised and often unrelated to the research, they don't need IPMR as they have their own advanced database geared for their own projects, and they don't need Ringing News to tell them how to age species X because maybe they read Russian or Japanese papers that BTO have never heard of and cannot translate, but which are nevertheless far superior to Svensson. Or maybe they have collected 30 years of their own solid data on ageing methods, but never published because Ringing & Migration or Ringing News are not academically relevant to their project or budget (they don't count as academic outputs).
So there is a distinction there, where hobby ringers 'need' the BTO's ringing scheme services and so are happy to 'work' for the BTO as volunteers. Academic ringers may not need the BTO at all, but they are being compelled by law to give away time, funding and data to a professional competitor - the BTO is not only the ringing regulator, it is also a player in the research field and so bids for contracts. So it is in the position of regulating its own potential competitors for tenders. That's a clear conflict of interest. The BTO will also sell the data you have been forced to donate, thereby gaining financially from your work, which you have already been forced to pay for twice (as a taxpayer funding BTO through JNCC, and as a ringer being forced to buy a permit).
So for the academic studying species X, within the BTO ringing scheme, to follow 'BTO protocol' may not be a priority or may be counter the project aims, as they are not collecting data for the BTO database at all -they are collecting data for themselves to their own project standards (which may be much higher) and are just being forced to give it to the BTO because of the administration of the ringing permit. So when you consider the amount of university ringing in this country, it is obvious that there are a lot of conflicts of interest when it comes to how data is collected and what is supplied to BTO (even if you're happy to share it all, it still takes time and money to put it into their IPMR system and jump through their hoops). So the idea that the ringing scheme is all one big team conforming to the same standards and with the same goals is quite wrong. And the BTO database will reflect that.
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wow - appreciate you are trying to make a point, and maybe getting a little taut as things can in there forums, but are you really try to wind ever one up? Create a dived between what is almost coming across as an elitist University project v non university ringing?
I suspect you are mainly trying to make a point at the BTO, but it is slightly put in a way that may wind up the amateur ringers.
A good majority of university student are trained by those non university amateur ringers, who do it free and often at considerable expense, to help train them to be able to ring as part of their studies or future career. How much would you normally pay for training like this if you had to do it though some paid facility/company? A lot, as most training is expensive and often over priced.
Not every university ringer that I have meet is that good or an expert on higher levels of identification, in fact some I have meet are pretty poor to be honest, but will never set the world of bird identification a light, and not every amateur ringer is completely unless either. Some ringers keep themselves up to date with birding identification developments and taxonomic changes. There are a hell of a lot of student ringers out there that do not. There are varying degrees of identification competence across the range of ringers both university and non university. It rather depends where you interests lie. Ringer for a Blue Tit Phd may have absolutely no interest in grasping the complexities of Gull identification, or neither might an amateur ringer.
The fact the University projects fall under the BTO scheme, ensures those doing ought to be trained to handle the birds safely, unlike projects overseas where you can find adverts for project interns that need no ringing experience that are allowed out in the field after one weeks training, catch lords knows what and probably having no idea what most of the bird are unless they are a keen ornithologist/birder in the first place!
I suspect you do not quite mean this at the level you have put it, but sadly you are not coming across to well.:smoke:
So lets cool for a moment. And I avoid getting on the band waggon regarding the UK cost of ringing.
Re the French ringers manual, having meet the author and having seen the pre-publication version and the post publication book, it is better than Svennson with more up to date information. It has restrictions in that it only covers bird seen in France but then Svennson when you get to eastern populations and taxonomic changes is now a little dire. As for Baker, it is poor and often helps little.
Sadly the French author who speaks English, is not keen to do an English translation, but is useable and with time you obviously will get the drift of more of the text as you pick bits up unless already fairly fluent in French.
Svennson needs a complete rewrite and if one just followed that alone, so you use what is available and from what sources you can get. In fact it suspect it may only get done if someone else is prepared to do the text rewrite as he is very busy with other porjects, but with some many articles out there now, even those by Svennson, I susepct it would not be too hard to do.
Otherwise if you followed Svennson to the exact as it is, you'd still be ringing various European Warblers as one species when they are now mostly split into Eastern/Western sp.
This topic has gone a long way from someone asking about the FRENCH RINGERS MANUAL |=)|
I suspect you are mainly trying to make a point at the BTO, but it is slightly put in a way that may wind up the amateur ringers.
A good majority of university student are trained by those non university amateur ringers, who do it free and often at considerable expense, to help train them to be able to ring as part of their studies or future career. How much would you normally pay for training like this if you had to do it though some paid facility/company? A lot, as most training is expensive and often over priced.
Not every university ringer that I have meet is that good or an expert on higher levels of identification, in fact some I have meet are pretty poor to be honest, but will never set the world of bird identification a light, and not every amateur ringer is completely unless either. Some ringers keep themselves up to date with birding identification developments and taxonomic changes. There are a hell of a lot of student ringers out there that do not. There are varying degrees of identification competence across the range of ringers both university and non university. It rather depends where you interests lie. Ringer for a Blue Tit Phd may have absolutely no interest in grasping the complexities of Gull identification, or neither might an amateur ringer.
The fact the University projects fall under the BTO scheme, ensures those doing ought to be trained to handle the birds safely, unlike projects overseas where you can find adverts for project interns that need no ringing experience that are allowed out in the field after one weeks training, catch lords knows what and probably having no idea what most of the bird are unless they are a keen ornithologist/birder in the first place!
I suspect you do not quite mean this at the level you have put it, but sadly you are not coming across to well.:smoke:
So lets cool for a moment. And I avoid getting on the band waggon regarding the UK cost of ringing.
Re the French ringers manual, having meet the author and having seen the pre-publication version and the post publication book, it is better than Svennson with more up to date information. It has restrictions in that it only covers bird seen in France but then Svennson when you get to eastern populations and taxonomic changes is now a little dire. As for Baker, it is poor and often helps little.
Sadly the French author who speaks English, is not keen to do an English translation, but is useable and with time you obviously will get the drift of more of the text as you pick bits up unless already fairly fluent in French.
Svennson needs a complete rewrite and if one just followed that alone, so you use what is available and from what sources you can get. In fact it suspect it may only get done if someone else is prepared to do the text rewrite as he is very busy with other porjects, but with some many articles out there now, even those by Svennson, I susepct it would not be too hard to do.
Otherwise if you followed Svennson to the exact as it is, you'd still be ringing various European Warblers as one species when they are now mostly split into Eastern/Western sp.
This topic has gone a long way from someone asking about the FRENCH RINGERS MANUAL |=)|
citrinella
Well-known member
Hi Alf, Sorry this has been a bit delayed by other priorities.
The point was pretty much what you are saying. Many publications appear to be using BTO data, but are using data collected by the authors so the presence or absence of BTO authors is not really relevant.
Cheers, Mike.
You seem to be arguing my point - that the data is not as good as it could be because ringers are not sticking to the protocol.
I think you are confusing two completely separate issues. The BTO does decide what goes in the Ringing Manual which is the protocol for the Scheme. No, they do not decide what appears in journals - but that is totally separate and is not automatically part of the Ringing Scheme. Perhaps you didn't notice that I asked how you could justify your judgement that CP Bells paper was substandard while at the same time assuming that all papers published in similar journals on ageing or sexing could not be sub-standard. Would you care to explain your reasoning ?
Yes, just like your first point. If you are not using the methods prescribed in the protocol, the BTO cannot tell you are corrupting the data.
Oops, funny, I thought we had been warned to look out for the next issue of Ringers' Bulletin in a recent email on new ring sizes - must have got that wrong !Ringers' Bulletin ended some years ago, and was replaced by Ringing News. Please keep up!
The point was pretty much what you are saying. Many publications appear to be using BTO data, but are using data collected by the authors so the presence or absence of BTO authors is not really relevant.
Cheers, Mike.
