Sketchy sightings

There does not appear, currently, be a means to validate legitimate sightings.

For instance, on the recommendation of a commenter on my blog I began adding my life list. I very quickly found what could become a big issue with regard to incorrect identifications with no apparent way to correct them.

Please check out the photos of Snow Goose. A user uploaded photos of what is clearly a domestic duck misidentified as Snow Goose, a fairly inexcusable mistake. And worse, it was not caught, indicating a lack of “quality control” with regard to individual sightings.

If one of the selling points of Birdpost is the ability to report rare bird sightings, this doesn’t inspire much confidence to that end that these sightings are worth much of anything.

Nathan – this is a community where the community polices each other. We don’t rely on a single authority to police all sightings/pictures. There are too many. We trust ultimately in the wisdom of hte birding community, who will flag misidentified pictures/sightings, communicate with each other about erroneous sightings, etc. By the way, there is a mechanism to report or “flag” any misidentified pictures that you see so that we are aware of them. Choose the picture, click the flag and then we’ll know about it. By the way, your blog is great - JP

Thank you, Jason. A “list” of incorrectly identified photos will be forthcoming.

I also noticed the “snow goose” was a domestic duck. I also noticed that you do not allow for the seperation of Lesser snow geese vs Greater snow geese. While I do not have a good picture of a greater, I do have a lesser snow picture…..
[IMG]http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e179/kansasgoose/DSC000095.jpg[/IMG]

If you make a change, would you also allow for the fact that lesser snow geese come in two color phases, White and blue.

I take it then that all of the photos are posted by the members, never by the admins? Also, I see the copyright symbol on the lower left next to the poster’s screen name. This implies that the poster and the photgrapher are one and the same. Is that correct? It would be helpful if the process of flagging a photo as misidentified allowed the flagger to (hopefully) correctly ID the bird. For example, the flight photo of Broad-winged Hawk is a nice picture…except that it’s a nice picture of a Red-tailed Hawk, but I have no mechanism except to flag it as wrong.

Paul – the majority of the images posted are user-generated. There are some images on the site that are public domain and that have been uploaded. And yes, the poster and the user are one and the same on Birdpost. Red-flagging a bird image brings it to the attention of the Birdpost admin who can then re-categorize the image properly. We wouldn’t want to allow Birdpost users to arbitrarily change the classification of a bird without our team seeing it first. We prefer this buffer between users.

Ben Crockett
Birdpost