[obol] Re: in case others are as clueless as I am about common vs black
- From: Jeff Gilligan <jeffgilligan10@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: whoffman@xxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2016 09:38:51 -0800
On Nov 15, 2016, at 9:26 AM, whoffman@xxxxxxxx wrote:
I will add one more thing. As Steve described, a lot of the literature and
some field guides describe the color on the bill as "yellow."
Yeah - "yellow" like a grocery store carrot!
To me they almost always look Orange. Both the big knob on Black Scoters,
and the smaller patch or saddle forward of the black knob on the Common
Scoter.
Wayne
Good point. I have seen this sort of thing before where one source just copies
an earlier bad source and it builds. Before good field guides, we used to
refer to Dementiev's Birds of the Soviet Union for things lie descriptions of
Slaty-backed Gull. (You lucky birders who started on third base in the past
several decades…..). Dementiev referred to the gull as having a massive bill.
That was repeated and even illustrated. Only When photo guides from Japan were
available did we learn the true bill size and shape of the species. Even in
things like human diet where someone incorrectly concluded that the combination
of legumes and rice created a better protein, that false information was
repeated many times and many places, even after the originator of the theory
recanted. I could give other examples of repeated false information that is
validated by people who copy it and claim it as their own without thought or
research.
Jeff Gilligan
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