A bit of a conundrum

I think most of this still gets back to one of the main principles of IDing on iNat: Only ID what you can verify yourself. If you can’t verify it, whether it is information in another ID or a comment, you shouldn’t agree. The ID represents your own expertise and experience. It’s really difficult to interpret someone else’s reasoning or confidence from a short comment about an ID and not really necessary. If they wanted to ID it, they would have!

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Sometimes when there are multiple species in the photo, I’m unsure which species the observer wants ID’d, so I comment, instead of identifying. If the observation reaches Research Grade after that, I probably won’t come back and add an identification. I don’t feel an identification by me was needed. Not that I’m opposed to adding my ID, and sometimes I do, but I go through notifications pretty fast and if the observation is RD I don’t stop.

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If you tell me there’s multiple species I’ll split them, but it’s confusing when you only tell me what one of them is, because what if the one on the left is a juvenile Glaucous-winged? I don’t like to duplicate observations if there’s just multiple individuals of the same species.

I’m likely to do that when I can only identify one of them! I know two or more are present, so I don’t know which you want ID’d, but I only know one. I’m especially unlikely to ID when the one I know is the really common one and I figure the observer may be more interested in the other one(s).

At least that day I only know one. Yesterday I was really tired from a field trip the day before and didn’t want to put any effort into gull ID, which is difficult.

I am sorry that my posting was irritating. Sometimes I’m too focused in on what I’m doing, rather than the whole observation / observer / identifier interaction. I’d say I’ll try to do better, but unfortunately improvement is unlikely.

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OK folks, let’s keep this on topic. Everyone has a slightly different way of doing things, and interpreting responses.

I’ve now added a bit of comment about Tuesday. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/71970667

The topic has been closed at the request of the original poster.

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