My Two Cents Worth

The submission of bird sightings to various websites can be a very hit and miss affair. Generally, all I need from a website is that the information presented is relevant, concise, accurate and appears in a timely fashion.

For example, one male Blackbird, somewhere in Clwyd, two weeks ago last Thursday is hardly useful, whereas a Hoopoe, in horse paddocks next to Greenfield Dock, present today still (I can dream), clearly is.

Birdguides is probably the best website in that it meets all the above criteria, with the only drawback being that it costs money to receive the full service. It does irritate me sometimes though in the seemingly arbitrary fashion it adopts when evaluating submissions for publication.

Yesterday was a prime example. I found a Ring Ouzel on Ruabon Moor and when returning home faced the decision that many of us birders face – whether to report the sighting, and if yes, then where to send the information.

I chose to send it off to Birdguides, but as in the case of my juvenile female Goshawk at Pennington Flash last November and a few others in recent times, it failed to materialise on the website.

I can only speculate to why these submissions were rejected. I assume in the case of the Ring Ouzel, they were worried about disclosing potential breeding sites. This highlights another of their failings in that being based in London they lack local knowledge - the bird was clearly on migration.

The Goshawk on the other hand would probably have been dismissed as an erroneous sighting - this is understandable to a degree, but also slightly pompous. Moreover, as with the Ring Ouzel it implies a certain level of stupidity (some people may have sympathy with that view) on my behalf – that I was daft enough to disclose a nesting site and too crap a birder to distinguish between a juvenile Sparrowhawk and a juvenile Goshawk at twenty yards.

There are of course other options. The North Wales Birding Forum is generally a very good website, but in recent times many of the threads have become bogged-down with a plethora of extremely average photographs (with some notable exceptions) – how many pictures of a Snow Bunting can one look at? It also suffers from a high level of ‘recycling’ – how many times do we need to know that there are Snow Buntings at Kimnel Bay, a Black Redstart at the Little Orme and some Hawfinches at Llanbedr?

Again, the Dee Estuary website is an excellent resource, but its major drawback is that any information sent is subject to delay and thus does not always appear in a timely fashion. Whilst this gives a good assessment of ‘what’s about’, it can be frustrating to get information on a good bird when it’s too late.

So, what to do? For the meantime I will probably just use Birdguides, but as ever most of my sightings will have to be disentangled from my irrelevant, vague, inaccurate and tardy prose.

Until later.

P.S – This whinge only occurred because there was absolutely nothing at Greenfield this morning, not even a Hoopoe!