[mou] Counting birds

[beimborn]

We should not forget nearly all of us go birding for fun.  The different 
levels of participation in the activity mean there must be some standards at 
some points. Hard to understand why anyone would get upset over a set of 
standards to regard a record as accepted or not.  If some levels don't match 
your interests, work on the levels that work.  Birders who want to set up 
their own standards have every right to do so and should not have to worry 
excessively whether a bird is countable or not countable. They are all 
countable, depending on what rules you want to use.

That said, why not have a space on the records sheet for all possible bird 
species?  The people who look at the validity of the records can later label 
them as likely escapes, game farm birds, or whatever.

My suggestion is that the records be kept and not be lost. The Chuckar and 
Bob White are bad examples because so many people who keep decorative fowl 
in their back yards are also likely to lose or release a few.  This fact 
alone is interesting and should be shared so that all birders recognize the 
likely status of such a sighting.  Personally, if I saw one in my back yard, 
I'd write it on the calendar!

What about birds that are in the process of establishing new populations in 
the state?  Suppose those first few Cardinals found in Minnesota in the 30's 
had been regarded as uncountable as escaped cage birds. We'd have lost a lot 
of interesting information if we started out calling them uncountable and 
ignored those first few records.

Another example. I've been trying to track the gradual spread of Eurasian 
Tree Sparrows from their once small range in St. Louis.  There are several 
web sites that accept records from amateur banders and post maps on the 
sites.  Several of them have some interesting records of the Eurasian Tree 
Sparrow at some distance from St. Louis.  I tried to learn a bit about how 
one of these sites collected or verified records. The answer included a 
comment that they dropped some geographically unlikely records of the 
species.  Too bad. Those might have been some interesting bits of new 
information.  There seems to be an accepted recent record from upper 
Michigan that is kind of geographically improbable.  The first bird is 
always improbable.

The point is that all data are valuable.  We may have good reasons for 
ignoring data but I hate to see us take the risk of destroying it.

Don Beimborn
By Cedar Lake