Today I saw what appeared to be a vole repeatedly running out from a patch of shrubbery, collecting dandelion parts and then running back in. The vole was only clearly visible for brief periods of a few seconds, and it was concealed by shrubbery for most of the time I was watching (~50 minutes). I have multiple vole photos taken several minutes apart. Should I submit them all as one observation? I believe my photos are all of the same individual, but I can’t prove there weren’t multiple voles hiding in the shrubbery and emerging at different times. (I don’t know much about voles, so I’m not sure how likely that is.)
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yes you should
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When I’ve had this happen before (usually with flighty bugs) I just leave a note in the observation, like “I think this is the same animal in all photos but it disappeared a few times so it might be more than one”
Unless this is some extremely rare species, I don’t see any harm in this even if you may have accidentally captured 2 examples of the same species in the same observation.
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A group of organisms of the same species can definitely be in one observation. One may argue it should be, even if you are sure there were more than one. For example, a bird flock may be of thousands individuals, but submitting them as different obs will make a huge pile of “Needs ID” obs which will be a pain for identifiers. If you just wish to show number of individuals, use observation field “count”. But if the animals are of different sex or age and you wish to annotate them as such, you may want to make different observations for them.
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I would post only one observation with multiple pictures. I also typically take out the time info and just leave the date, since it’s now an observation covering a time frame and not a particular hour and minute. If I think it’s important, I may note in the description if it was morning or evening etc. Once the same individual shows up again the next day, I would make a new observation with the new date.
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It’s something of a grey area and you’re right to be asking the question. In this case, I would say there is reasonable enough certainty that it’s one individual to put in a single observation (with a note expressing any possible doubt if you so wish). Voles don’t generally occur in high numbers and yours was exhibiting a consistent behaviour over an hour of viewing, lending support to the suspicion that it was the same one each time.
That said, personally, I do err on the side of splitting into multiple observations if I don’t have any real evidence that it is the same individual. If I photograph a pigeon or a bumblebee in my garden, say, then it disappears and then seems to return a minute later, there’s every possibility it’s a different one the second time. So I would make a separate observation for a subsequent photo.
Ultimately it’s a matter of your own judgement, though. As long as you’re sure they’re the same species, there’s no significant harm in grouping what might be a few different individual pigeons into one observation. But either way, I’d say it’s good practice to put a note in the notes section of the observation briefly explaining any doubts you may have on this matter.
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