Even though I've never had a bite of Anne Heyerly's celebrated rum cake
(Anne, you must have been holding out at all those OFO meetings! ;-), I
agree wholehearted with Lars. CBCs are about far more than just data
gathering.
For over 100 years, the CBC has been a community-building project. Any
comparisons to eBird (or BirdNotes before eBird) just end up being
silly. It's a difference of real face-to-face human community vs.
virtual community.
The CBC also offers one of the main opportunities for
beginning/intermediate birders to spend time birding with advanced
birders, to see how they work a patch of habitat. Those are skills that
aren't going to get passed on via eBird.
But even when you come around to the data side, eBird leaves a lot to be
desired. Every month while compiling local field notes, I run across a
few local eBird reports that either sailed through the filters
unchallenged, or else have been "confirmed" by the local eBird reviewers
(whoever they might be), but turn out to be based on spotty details that
would not meet the normal standards of traditional field notes, or CBC
reporting.
A month or two ago, several "confirmed" reports of a particular rare
species -- apparently a first nesting record for Benton County -- simply
disappeared from eBird, after I went out to check this out myself and
found something much more common that explained all of the reports.
I can't get to all of the eBird reports but these ones were less than
1/2 mile from my house, and they turned out to be erroneous. The most
disturbing thing about this incident was that the reports were simply
deleted, even though they previously had been "confirmed."
I still have no idea who might have been the reviewer who confirmed
those reports, since there seems to be no public information as to who
reviews eBird reports for any given Oregon county (e.g. I recently found
out that Russ Namitz was the reviewer for Grant County, only after I
questioned a particularly dubious report for that county, and Russ
decided to contact me in person).
The CBC vetting process isn't foolproof but at least it's easy for us to
find a list of all of the CBC compilers, so we know who's riding herd on
which counts.
And we know that Mike Patterson, as regional compiler, is going to
scrutinize every oddball report that comes through the pipeline, drawing
on his long experience with all of the common foibles, including
over-optimistic local compilers.
In other words, the CBC review process has a degree of transparency that
we still don't see from eBird.
Long live the CBC!
Joel
--
Joel Geier
Camp Adair area north of Corvallis
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