Having participated in this statewide list since the beginning, Kevin, Isaac, and I have seen it change a lot as the birding information environment has changed. I think that recognizing the optimal threshold for inclusion/exclusion of posts is more difficult and takes more skill than most people recognize. It is therefore inevitable that people will disagree on the suitability of posts from time to time. Nevertheless, I believe that Kevin's and Isaac's criticisms are valid enough to warrant discussion--and a post to the list!
As Kevin senses and Isaac agrees, there has emerged a tendency downstate for over-reporting very common-place things (but I'm not convinced that Avocets really fall on that side of the threshold). This is probably mostly a function of inexperience and is usually amenable to improvement over time, sometimes, perhaps, with gentle prompts from more senior people, sent privately. At least as striking, however, is Isaac's point about inappropriate non-reporting from upstate. I guess the best we can do in that department is to praise Joan and Jay and Andy and others when they do make the effort to get the info out to the rest of the state, but some very remarkable records have failed to reach the statewide list in recent years. The Avocet business that pushed Kevin's buttons falls in an intermediate position. This species is usually rare enough statewide that I personally believe it deserves to be reported to the list, but I'll acknowledge that during a good flight, detailed accounting of the comings and goings of multiple individuals in a single region can get tedious. In my opinion, the first two extremes (over-reporting of really mundane stuff downstate and under-reporting of genuinely newsworthy birds upstate) are not only more serious than the Avocet sort of problem, but that they are also much more easily defined and remedied. In other words, we could do a lot worse than to take Avocet's statewide status as the approximate threshold for reporting birds to the list: it's easy to suggest to beginning birders downstate that a bird might not need to be reported to the list unless it approaches the rarity of Avocet; and it's similarly simple and logical to chide the central NY birding mafia for failing to report things that are much, much rarer than Avocet. Shai Mitra Bay Shore ________________________________ CSI Represents NY in Nationwide State Rankings. Learn more>>><http://csitoday.com/2014/04/csi-represents-ny-in-nationwide-state-rankings/> -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NYSB.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
