I don’t use eBird at all.
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Thank you guys for all your invalueable opinions, I think it’s great that we have big platforms like iNat and eBird that makes citizen science much easier for everyone, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter which you prefer over the other one. At the end of the day, the most important thing is to contribute to collecting data and doing our bit in helping protect this gem of a planet.
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I am completely jealous of your plant and bird systematics courses!!
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how do you record your checklists and bird counts?
Every photo is valuable on eBird. I’d implore you to please ignore the ratings of your pics, and continue to post. Being able to narrow down location, species and time of year is immensely helpful when doing ID for birds.
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eBird has a set of guidelines governing how to rate media. This is meant to standardize the rating system and is in no way meant to be a judgment on the worthiness of a photo’s inclusion. Even when rating my own photos, I follow these guidelines. A photo may be one of the best I’ve personally ever taken, but that does not mean that it is among the best that anyone has ever taken. Giving my own photo a rating of 3-4 instead of 5 in no way diminishes my pride for my photo.
Likewise, I often include fairly poor photos (e.g., this Rose-breasted Grosbeak), that honestly only deserve 2-3 stars. Photos in the Macaulay Library are used to train photo ID components of Merlin (similar to iNat’s computer vision), and poorer quality photos are instrumental for this. If you only train your automated recognizer on 5-star photos, your recognizer is only able to ID species in the highest quality photos, which has very limited applicability.
In my experience, people overrating photos is far more common than people underrating. But, if you feel like your photos are not being rated appropriately according to the guidelines, check out this Facebook group. This group focuses on unbiased ratings according to the guidelines, and multiple people rating a photo can counteract improper ratings (either from misinformed or malicious individuals, or from clicking errors).
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Well said! Use both, they have different uses and purposes as you clearly explained.
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Photos go on iNat, birds of particular interest (new lifers/rarities) go on eBird. My most complete life list, though, is actually a google doc organized by taxonomy, with every entry typed by hand. It may be old-fashioned but it’s how I do it, dammit!
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I haven’t used eBird, but this seems like a selling point to me. When I’m out birding, I feel like trying to get pictures is a distraction; I would rather just pencil my notes. Photography and note-taking are very different activities, done for different purposes.
Incidentally, the same question could be asked about other platforms. For instance, my submissions to Monarch Milkweed Mapper are separate from my iNaturalist activity as well. I like it because it is focused on just monarchs and milkweeds, so I feel that my data is more targeted to the end user’s needs.
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Tbh I merge both of those activities together, I note down the exact location, time and weather, and then I take a photo. Works for me 
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Most of the time, my photos dont get rated at all. You might have had a different experience, but people on ebird are not big on rating photos.
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I have checked your website out, and I must say I’m really impressed by it, it’s so neat and organised!
I use eBird for my birding and iNat for everything else. I occasionally add a bird here if I get a decent photo since iNat needs a photo.
Note: It is worth checking iNaturalist now and then to see what people are reporting in your area. It seems like some people who use iNaturalist don’t use eBird. So, you can find some unexpected species here in iNat if you use the Explore map and narrow the results down to your area in the past week or so.
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Taxonomy changes too often for me. I have one life list arranged temporally and another alphabetically for fun, plus a copy of the Clement’s checklist in a spreadsheet with names highlighted.
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Honestly I hadn’t even considered that… ah well, asi es la vida I guess…
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Yes ofc, ignore negativities and go with the flow 
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Many ebird users may not know about birdSTAT, but it allows you to summarize your data in all sorts of interesting ways.
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