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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ColinD" data-source="post: 1637704" data-attributes="member: 55409">Which is worse? Well I think that reporting something which your not sure about as a definate is much worse than surpression, because people will travel from all over the country for a rarity, using up petrol, time and money, which could be better used elsewhere. Of course, if you put it out as a probable or possible, then that gives people the option. Do they want to take the risk? It's their call.However, perhaps we're looking at this too deeply. We're all newbies in certain situations. I've just returned from New York, where I did a bit of birding. It's only the second time I've been to North America, and the first time was a family holiday to Florida. I did some research before I went and I saw lots of new species. However, there were plenty of birds which I wasn't sure about, and mainly because I didn't have the time to study them all, but also because there was so much else to see, lots of them got away as unidentified or possibles. At least one or two of them I thought might have been quite rare birds in that part of the US, but I just shrugged my shoulders and wandered off to the next bird, assuming that it wasn't a rarity, and it was just down to my inexperience. Should I have reported them to somebody? I don't think so, because I was probably wrong about the id. It would have been ridiculous to try to get somebody out to check on every bird I couldn't identify.I think that most newbies do this.</blockquote>

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