[wisb] Counting "after-the-fact" birds - a summary of discussion on another list

From: "B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@xxxxxxxxx>
To: wisbirdn <wisbirdn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:55:48 -0700 (PDT)

(NOTE: I got Peter Fissel's permission in advance before I posted this note to 
the list. He asked me to say that he wants this to be the last posting in this 
thread, so if you want to reply to me, please do it OFF-LIST).

After Peter ended this thread on WISBIRD, I decided to see what people on the 
national BIRDCHAT list thought about counting "after-the-fact" birds. I posed 
the following hypothetical question:

"I know people who take photos of flocks of gulls and then later pore over them 
on their computer in an attempt to find unusual species. Let's say someone 
finds a Ross's Gull in one of their photos. They didn't know there was a Ross's 
in the flock when they were in the field, but made an after-the-fact ID from 
the photo documentation. Would this Ross's Gull be countable?"

I received 28 responses, both on and off-list. A few people didn't understand 
the question, and a few more went off on tangents that didn't address the 
question. The vast majority of the rest of the respondents said that the bird 
in my hypothetical example would NOT be ABA-countable. Quite a few cited the 
ABA "Rule 4" that Peter posted to WISBIRD.

Interestingly, a few people who strongly stated that the bird would NOT be 
ABA-countable also said that Rule 4 doesn't *explicitly* say this. Here are a 
couple of examples:

* "They don't explicitly address the situation of a bird noticed for the first 
time in a photo, however."

* "The rule is ambiguous in that the photo could be construed as 'documented by 
the recorder.'"

So I guess it's more of a commonly-accepted interpretation of Rule 4, rather 
than a hard and fast rule.

Finally, I've learned that after-the-fact IDs from photos have been 
successfully used to document new state records. So, theoretically, a person 
could have a state record for a species that's not on his state list. :-)

Bernie Sloan
Milwaukee




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[wisb] Counting "after-the-fact" birds - a summary of discussion on another list

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