Geese and Ducks That Are Brought Into Parks--Wild or Captive?

Non-native doesn’t mean not wild, so while there’re many reasons to keep an eye on feral birds, users do that, and as current iNat system doesn’t have anything between captive and wild to fit those animals (which was proposed, but there’s no feature request as I know, but I’d like to have third option added), they use wild as they fit criteria for wild on iNat. I don’t think anyone here is happy with invasive or just alien species.

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I agree that determining whether a goose or duck is part of a wild population or not can be very difficult or even impossible in practice. As for the term captive, I think it is an unfortunate choice of words to describe what I think of a wild animal. A lot of cats and even dogs are never captive, but they belong to an household and I would not consider them wild.

there are often single or pairs of birds especially wildfowl that wander around outside captivity as escape or less enlightened releases - but the criteria is

  • a species that had been introduced to a new region and has established a population outside of human care

established population I would suggest is breeding - and human care is not someone feeding them as they have free flying wildfowl on their collection or zoo lakes…

it is about established self sustaining populations that freely roam.

feral Pigeons being one example, but if you had a single non-native Parrot turn up on the feeders in your garden that someone had accidentally lost - does not make it wild, it is in the wild, but is an escape and that is maybe the category that needs adding is ‘escape’

Wild

  • zebra in the Serengeti (assuming it’s not in a zoo in the Serengeti)
  • fly on a zebra in a zoo
  • weed or other unintended plant growing in a garden
  • butterfly that flew into a building
  • snake that you just picked up (yes, it’s in your hand where you intended it to be, but the place and time is where the snake intended to be)
  • feral dog or cat
  • your museum/herbarium specimens that are appropriately marked with date and location of original collection
  • garden plant that is reproducing on its own and spreading outside of the intended gardening area
  • a pigeon that benefits from human populations but is not actually raised by humans
  • a bird caught by a pet cat (presuming the bird isn’t also a pet)
  • a bird (not pet bird) that comes to an outdoor bird feeder
  • living organisms dispersed by the wind, water, and other forces apart from humans
  • a species that had been introduced to a new region and has established a population outside of human care
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While I agree that some fact-checking should be done on park waterfowl (I’ve worked to fix up some of the London observations myself), I completely disagree that iNat can’t be used as a tool to monitor feral populations. In fact, I believe it is the best tool in some ways. Birders tend to ignore non-countable species (I’ll never understand why so many established populations aren’t countable) and therefore, birders just straight up aren’t monitoring populations in many areas. This isn’t helped by a lot of eBird reviewers who won’t let non-countable observations appear on the site. iNat doesn’t really run into either of these issues.

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It is still wild for iNat, it doesn’t have all the possible examples there and staff can assure you escaped parrot is wild.

Is there an official statement somewhere where the iNat staff define what they mean by wild? Also, do you know if there is an “official” thread discussing these matters? I think further discussing of these issues here might be getting a bit out of place.

I think that would be the “official” thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/options-for-the-best-way-to-handle-non-established-obs-e-g-escaped-released-pets/16684

No, there’s not (and one you linked also is not, it’s not official until called so in the topic name), there’re miriads topics about the question though, but you can just use the definition “Checking captive / cultivated means that the observation is of an organism that exists in the time and place it was observed because humans intended it to be then and there.” Esapee means it’s not under human control anymore, it may still stay near humans, but it could easily go somewhere else, so parrot flying with other birds is wild.

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Yes, it’s not official indeed, but it seems to be the one closest one to official. As for the definition, it is really open to interpretation depending on what is understood by place. Is it a cage, a house, someone’s property, someone pasture, a continent even? By this definition, an unrestrained cat could be considered wild even inside a house! Defining things unambiguously is always difficult anyway ;)

If it was brought inside the house by humans and now they intentionally doesn’t let it go outside or look after when it’s out and when it’s inside, plus providing at least most of the food, there’re enough intentional behaviour to say it’s captive, but there’re more edge cases, like “stray” dogs that in fact can be someone’s dog with a collar, but their movements are not regulated by those people (and it can get “lost” eventually, but as pack has own territory you may ask why it’s there - because of a human or other dogs?) and food is provided either voluntarily by random people or they get it from trash/kill cats/etc. Is it really captive because someone claims the ownership of it? In previous topics free roaming cats were compared with wild ones despite being not wild, but you can say such a cat doesn’t behave outside the same way feral cat does, even when it kills it’s not really to eat, but to play most of the time, coming back to birds in parks, we need to think how exactly they survive and which food sources they rely on, but it’s more complicated by mallards that in last 40-50 years decided bread is cool and are wintering in places they never massively did it before, completely survivng only from food brought by humans, while nobody really questions if they’re wild or not, so when we talk about park birds we have to take those mallards in mind, so it’s far from an easy task and it’s one of reasons why people tend to simplify this question and look only on how animal is moving.

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