When IDing crow images, I and others ask observers if the birds vocalized to help discern between American and fish crows. If they say no, we keep it in general crows and ravens.
I always note in obs if a American crow went caw caw and a fish crow went eheheh but usually don’t record American crows and only sometimes fish.
Someone today is placing these IDs in the general Crow category and said you can only ID based on evidence provided. I’m wondering if my verbal account of vocalization is ever evidence? Especially for common species? If everyone posting crows needed to pair audio for an obs to be confirmed, the vast majority of sightings would be downgraded. I mostly take photos.
I consider a person’s note about such vocalization to be evidence. Not only because of what it says about the call, but also because of what it tells about the observer; they know they should listen for that. If these species were rare, I might be more cautious, but not in this case.
Absolutely counts as evidence, but the IDer has the prerogative to evaluate that evidence. So if there are other characters that go against the description/traits in the notes, they think the observer may be being mistaken/untruthful, etc. they can evaluate in that manner. That said, I don’t think that going through all American/Fish crows and knocking them back to genus is a good idea - in this case, the character is a clearly known trait that is evaluable in the field and observers often put in the description. I would only ignore a written description of the call in this situation unless I had quite strong grounds for doing so.
I sometimes post Crows in an area that has both Fish Crows and American Crows. I wasn’t aware of the difference until once when an identifier asked me if I had heard the bird calling. Since I hadn’t, I knocked my ID back to genus. Then I learned to recognize their calls, and now I make a note stating when I heard them clearly. And they generally do get identified with no trouble, even though I’ve never managed to get an audio recording.
Fortunately, most (crow) identifiers seem to share this belief:
The observer’s account should count as evidence, that needs to be evaluated against possible biases, mistakes and misunderstanding.
My description of a corvid call was rejected because the other species makes a very similar call under certain conditions.
The description of the wing adjustment was accepted though (on a different corvid observation).
Personally I compare it with the standards for Casual observations. If they provide no media evidence, even if they give a great description, it can never be RG. Someone gives a detailed description of a crow (enough to rule out grackles, starlings, ravens etc.) and says that it went “caw”? Still not enough if there isn’t photo or audio. Why would that standard change if they do provide media but it’s no help for ID? (I don’t actively go around knocking back crow observations and I might not to do a hard disagree if I did, but I don’t understand why they should be RG from the evidence provided…)
I think I’d trust description of appearance better than description of calls, given that the calls can be ambiguous (e.g. young American sound more similar to Fish) and that most people “know” that crows “caw” which might bias descriptions from newer observers. Although for appearance, plenty of people think that grackles are crows too…
I disagree with your premise. Perhaps that’s because I come from a birding background, including being on a state committee that evaluated rare bird sightings long before good photos of birds were so common. Written notes are evidence. If a researcher wants to disregard them all on principle, he can, but others will be happy to see the record.
I believe the reason why observations with no media are casual is because media is considered to provide documentation that something was there (i.e., serves as a voucher). An observation with no media doesn’t have a voucher, even if the observer includes detailled notes. The rules are perhaps slightly inconsistent in that iNat does allow field sketches to be eligible for RG and it seems like a written description is not all that different from a sketch (if questions of reliability of the observer account are taken into account, a text description can be evaluated exactly the same way a sketch can). But here, too, the difference may be that a field sketch made on paper with information such as date/time/location recorded in the journal permanently documents the particular moment of the encounter in a way that digital notes that might have been made or edited at any time do not. (I realize that not everyone thinks field sketches should be eligible for RG and I am not trying to open up that debate again, but I think it helps get at the basic difference in documentation that media vs. no media is supposed to capture, and it is not really about whether additional information besides the provided media should be considered when making IDs.)
Notes can provide additional insight into the observer’s interpretation of what they saw/heard while in the field. This is going to be more subjective than an image or audio recording, but I do not see any reason why it should be automatically excluded from consideration. Even if we know that observers may sometimes make mistakes, this does not mean that nothing they take note of in the field is correct. Particularly if the observer has some experience, they may well be capable of accurately noting things they perceived but were not able to record.
If observer notes were to be disregarded completely, there would be all sorts of information that could no longer be used to help with ID: smell/taste, texture, DNA sequence results, information about host, links to previous observations of the same individual, etc.
That does not mean that observer notes should be automatically accepted uncritically. Evaluating notes also requires assessing their reliability – are the observed characteristics things that are likely to be misinterpreted in the field, do the notes convincingly suggest that the observer in fact saw/heard/smelled what they said they did and isn’t just writing what they expected to hear or copying information from somewhere, does the account in the notes agree with the evidence provided in the media, are the notes detailled enough to be meaningful, does the observer have enough experience to interpret the calls, etc.
Often evaluating these things may be more challenging than evaluating photo or audio evidence. If one is not personally comfortable doing so, that is fine. I don’t think personal discomfort (rather than solid reasons to doubt the content of the notes) is a good justification for disagreeing, however. Better to skip the observation and leave it for someone else in such cases.
I don’t disagree here. My premise isn’t that notes can’t be reliable evidence; it’s that they typically haven’t been considered so on iNat, at least on their own. An eBird observation with no notes (equivalent to an iNat Casual obs) is equivalent on GBIF to a RG observation from iNat, and I have fairly high trust in eBird observations. It’s always been possible to fake notes, but as AI technology improves photos may well be in a similar category soon.
Yeah, and Tony has said recently that they only consider field sketches made at the time of observation to be valid media evidence. A field journal page with drawings and corresponding notes both made while observing the organism is pretty trustworthy.
Some of these are easier to fake than others. Usually the host species is visible enough in photos that you can at least tell if the observer is way off base for example. Similarly if there are better photos of the same organism, you may be able to tell that a tree is the same tree even if you can’t identify it from some photos.
I guess the question is how much margin of error is acceptable. If you are more trusting of easier-to-fabricate evidence then you’ll get more inaccurate data. But most examples will still be accurate regardless, or have negligible impact (e.g. in areas where both crow species are abundant).
I apologize. I thought we were discussing notes that are included in an observation that also has photos, in cases where the notes are important for ID. I agree that if there is no media at all, the record should go to casual.
I also thought we were discussing notes that were included as a supplement to existing media.
@upupa-epops made the comparison of notes in observations without media and notes in observations with media. I don’t think the fact that observations without media are casual is an argument for disregarding notes in observations that do have media. This misunderstands the logic of why observations without media are casual on iNat. I also don’t see why notes should be assumed a priori to be unreliable, which seems to be the premise. Both notes and drawings represent a different sort of information than photos (because they are second-hand, having been filtered through the observer’s consciousness) and need to be assessed accordingly, but most people who are adding notes are doing so in good faith, not with the intention of faking anything. In cases where the notes are a description of a taxon suggested by the CV rather than the observer’s attempt to describe what they saw, this is generally pretty obvious because their description is very generic and has little relation to what is visible in the photo.