eBird Commentary

This is a post I should have written more than a year ago, because eBird seems to have cleaned things up a bit since June 2023 when I noticed it. First, some background. American Robin is a polytypic species, with Pyle (1998) delineating five subspecies as occurring in Canada and the US:     caurinus  -- breeds coastally from southeast Alaska to northwest Oregon and winters south to southern California     propinquus  -- year-round in the interior from south-central British Columbia and southern Saskatchewan and south to coastal southwest California east to western Texas     migratorius  -- breeds from Alaska south and east to central British Columbia then to central Quebec and southeast to New Jersey and winters south within that range but also south from New Mexico to Florida     nigrideus  -- breeds from northern Quebec through Newfoundland, wintering south to Mississippi and Florida     achrusturus  -- year-r...

... there was word of mouth and, for some, publication options. For most, bird-occurrence data were unimportant and, particularly, unknown and unlooked for. With the advent of the widespread availability of telephones in houses, phone trees became established in certain cities to spread word of rare birds. Audubon societies and bird clubs spread and became sources of information on bird occurrence. Then the Internet came into being and was gradually co-opted for distributing information on the occurrence of, even, not-so-rare species. Then the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology said, "Let there be eBird," and it was... not so much good as better than anything previous. Excellent planning on the front end about some aspects of what eBird would do and how it would do it made for a reasonable stab at its first steps. The powers that be sussed that some sort of filter of incoming data would be required, but the thinking on that topic, in my estimation, was sub-par, even very poor...