For those of you that find the term “conservative count” or “conservative
estimate” confusing, here is what they mean to me, and I actually find them
quite useful.
(I’ve personally never heard of a “liberal count” so I’ll just leave
that term to you liberals).
CONSERVATIVE COUNT: I’m walking through a field of Leconte’s Sparrow
habitat and I count 39 Leconte’s Sparrows flushing ahead of me over the
course of 20 minutes as I walk all the way across the field. 18 of them
come back up exactly where they had dropped in earlier, and therefore are
most likely the same birds being counted again. I throw those out as
recounts. That leaves 21 different birds, but out of those 21, another 6
could easily have run a ways and been counted again when they flew a second
time. I throw those out as well. That leaves 15 birds that flew back
around or far enough to the side to be confirmed as “different” birds. The
count is therefore 15. This is a conservative count. It’s not a 1 by 1
count. That’s usually not possible in field conditions. It’s not an
accurate count. That would be much higher.
CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATE:
I didn’t take the time to count the Mallards along Refuge Road today
because I didn’t have time. (If I did I would accomplish little else). Two
weeks ago I did try to count them by 10s, 50s, 100s, (They’re scattered
everywhere) and I came up with 6,000 though that count could easily be off
by several thousand.
Today I’m pretty sure the numbers are still just as high as they were
last time I was here, and might be anywhere from 4,000 to 20,000 along
Refuge Road. So I take the low number and report 4,000 as a conservative
estimate. It’s definitely not a count and it’s also not accurate but it’s
better than an x and it’s an amount that I can easily verify if necessary.
(Of course, on a Christmas Bird Count I usually don’t get off this easily).
Something else that I noticed happens a lot if you actually get out there
in real life. At least it happens to me:
I start an ebird checklist. Three Starlings fly over, so I enter 3
Starlings. Ten more Starlings fly over so I enter 10 more. 15 minutes later
a big flock of Starlings comes through, all headed in the same direction. I
frantically count Starlings by tens, and I round it off to 500, which I
think was reasonably accurate. Unfortunately, now I have a grand total of
513 European Starlings, and it’s flagged on ebird. I realize this is an
irritating number for some people but it’s the closest I could get and I
really don’t have time to go back and take off those first three birds.
This happens all the time when using the mobile app. If you guys wanna
quibble about these numbers you clearly have more time on your hands than I
do.
Ruben Stoll, Centerville Tennessee.
On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 10:50 PM Scott Somershoe <ssomershoe@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
All,
Here is a good essay on how to count and report birds for your eBird
lists. There are a few specific points in here that rise to the top during
CBC time, especially when counting large flocks of birds and reporting a
“conservative count or estimate” of which no count is conservative not
liberal. I encourage you all to read this. It’s great!
http://cowyebird.blogspot.com/2019/12/details-provided-about-counting.html?m=1
Scott Somershoe
Littleton CO
Sent from my iPhone
