So - should I have intervened, tried to reason with them, showed them more photos to prove the IDs, or simply ignore it and let it go? I let it go - but then the part that bothers me is seeing e-bird lists which have all these sightings on it, which will mislead many other folks reading those lists and hoping to go find some rarities that were never there.
On reflection, it is surely preferable to just mind ones own business.
Unless asked, there is no reason to question someone else's IDs. While discussing sightings is one of the joys of birding, trying to correct IDs after the fact often just irritates rather than informs.
Surely, if you're seeing the bird that they are seeing and you know they are wrong, most would consider it neighbourly to assist with ID for those less experienced?
In such a circumstance, you're not questioning their ID, you're correcting it, I think that this is the scenario, not an after the fact ID assassination?
A
For you: just ignore these people.
Abut the ebird: I really have an issue with ebird and similar gatherings of huge low quality data in science, which are poorly vetted or not vetted. I seriously doubt whether, as somebody suggested, moderators of ebird check records of all members, flag those who are outliers, and check if they are stringers. Most often publications based on big, low quality data in biology ignore the problem altogether. In short, the authors say: we know we may do bull***t results because we use bull**** data, but we write anyway.
Where has the idea that most of the data on eBird is poor quality come from? Yes there are mistakes in there - but the vast majority of data points in eBird (and BirdTrack, and other citizen science schemes) are correct.
Where has the idea that most of the data on eBird is poor quality come from? Yes there are mistakes in there - but the vast majority of data points in eBird (and BirdTrack, and other citizen science schemes) are correct.
I agree with this. Looking at our local county (Alachua in Florida), we have ca. 50 ebird lists submitted daily. Probably 40 of those are by established birders who live here that I know, another handful are new birders who live here that I know the name but haven't met, and a small fraction are completely unknown to me. The signal from the good birders far outweighs the bad signal, and filters on numbers, season, and rarity catch many errors. I would largely trust most eBird results even with trickier IDs like yellowlegs.
Andy
Where did anyone write 'most' though the sheer volume alone is enough to suggest less than stellar quality?
I've certainly seen some very poor birders, uploading stuff when I was in Costa Rica last year.
A
It has always amused me that other birders actually care what others have on their list.
Prepares to be shot -
Your story of Willow Tits is a perfect example of very common mistake coming in publications which used big data: bad results based on little data are published along good results based on good data. And at the end, both are treated as good.
I guess the project had lots of valid data points for common species like, say, Robin. For species with little data, like Willow Tit, errors were sometimes sufficent to confuse the picture. But good and bad was published together, and some reader will later pick only Willow Tit and believe nonsense.
Unfortunately, many 'assurances' which people believe about big data points are not true:
- More data does not mean less mistakes. It simply means propagation of errors to a bigger magnitude.
- That most data is true, does not mean that minority of bad data will not spoil results.
- That somebody verifies data by eye and removes ones which look bad is not making data much better. Because one is really producing data set based on his pre-conception. When one finds something new in that data, how do we know whether it is real or an error not filtered because was not expected? When one does not find something, maybe it was hidden by mistake?
I wanted once to write some article or something to a bird magazine 'what mistakes people make when using big databases of bird records' but never got to it. So this little post must be enough...
But coming back to the humble topic, whether a birder can trust ebird when looking for a new bird. My private rule of thumb is to trust the place to go for a new bird only if there are at least 5 records coming from at least 4 different people, and if there is more similar places with the same bird around. Unless I know the birder by name.