What Makes a Good Bird Report
What makes a good bird report?
I've been thinking recently about what makes a good bird report. When I was running the Santa Clara Valley Audubon South Bay Birds reporting email list, two or three times a month, I get an email from someone where the question is, essentially "I saw this bird report and I want to look for the bird, but I have no idea where this place is".
In looking back at recent emails like this, I see a couple of common things we do when filing reports to the list. One is one I have been guilty of at times and I have been trying to break that habit: using a location identifier that makes sense if you know the location, and makes absolutely no sense if you don't. Two examples I've been guilty of and had emails sent to me asking for help are "State and Spreckles" and the "Milpitas Eagle Nest".
If you've been birding in Santa Clara County, "State and Spreckles" is likely burned into your brain and you know it's in Alviso. But if you're fairly new to the area or to birding, that's not really helpful in finding the place. "State and Spreckles in Alviso", on the other hand, is a simple improvement that makes the location a lot easier to figure out for someone who doesn't already know the answer. That eagle nest term is similar, but I also think suggesting we always spell it out as the "Eagle Nest at Curtner elementary" is a bit much, so I guess there are no simple answers to things like these.
The other thing I see happening are reports like "I found the bird at the spot Jerry reported last Tuesday", which is fine if you haven't already deleted that email, you know the list has archives and how to go searching in them and you know who Jerry is.
There's a commonality in both of these problems: we get comfortable with what we're doing and we tend to start communicating in shorthand. Which works fine if you've been doing it long enough to understand the shorthand, but it's confusing and opaque to people without the experience to decode it.
Since this impacts our newer and less experienced birders most and they are less likely to drop into the list and ask questions when they're unsure, I think it makes the list a less inclusive and fun place for those birders, and those are people we want to nurture and welcome into our birding community, not exclude with shorthand and jargon. So I'm writing this to ask people to please think about how they post to the list and whether what they're posting is understandable to those that don't have the experience we senior birders have.
The best way to solve this, I think, is to your reports to eBird, to share a link to the eBird report when you pass the report around. If you don't use eBird or prefer not to post links to your reports, I want to suggest you include at least the city and street, not just an intersection, or some specific location identifier like "Coyote Valley OSP". Whatever location you offer I'd like someone to be able to type into a map app and have it resolve out to something useful.
But all birders — especially the more senior of us — need to get better at avoiding shorthand in our reports, and I include those four letter banding code shorthands as part of the problem here. Any time you report out a sighting to a wider audience, try to remember that not all of the audience knows all of the shorthand terms that end up used and shared — we end up isolating and intimidating the newer birders with them and make them feel unwelcome by doing so.
